UNDERSTANDING AP® THEMES IN PART SIX

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Accelerating Global Change and Realignment

Congratulations on nearing the end of your AP® World History studies. The final chapters of this text make up Part Six and correspond to Period 6 of the AP® course outline. This time period constitutes 20 percent of your AP® exam.

In every phase of the human journey, world history focuses attention on the intersections of various peoples, civilizations, and societies. That process, widely known now as globalization, has been especially prominent over the past century or so and is therefore the guiding theme of Part Six of Ways of the World. Wars, both hot and cold, have taken shape on a global stage. The emergence of dozens of new nations, arising from the end of empires, emphatically changed the architecture of world politics. Modern economic development has become a global quest; industrialization and its profoundly disruptive environmental impact likewise operated globally even as the economies of particular nations became inextricably connected to one another. Social, cultural, and political movements such as communism, feminism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism assumed worldwide dimensions, crossing national or civilizational boundaries. To paraphrase the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne, more than ever before in human affairs, “No man or woman is an island, entire of itself; everyone is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

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