One of our goals in learning about history is to make it “usable.” In other words, how can we take what we’ve learned about the past and apply it to today, or even to the future? Today, you’ll think about…
The World History Project starts where the Big History Project leaves off, and focuses on the history of humanity. By taking a closer look at three different narratives of history, the World History Project examines how we organize our communities; how we make and share the goods we use every day; and the networks through which ideas and information are shared. WHP also has a strong focus on developing the skills historians use to practice historical reasoning: claim testing, comparison, contextualization, and more. Along the way, the World History Project course looks to make history usable by drawing lines from various points in history to today, always with an eye toward tomorrow.
To support your high school students at home, experienced WHP teacher Wood Boyles will guide students daily through the World History Project. He will provide content recommendations, along with a Word of the Day and guiding questions to frame each day’s content.
If you are a parent who wants a little more support as you use these materials with your kids, sign up as home school teacher at whp.oerproject.com and join the WHP Teacher Community. This is where you’ll find real-time support from other WHP educators and academics, and get your own questions answered.
Wood teaches at Highland School of Technology in Gastonia, NC. He was one of the founding teachers of the World History Project, helping to shape the program from the outset. When not in the classroom, Wood coaches cross country and plays drums in a bagpipe band. He also enjoys reading, watching old cars shows, being with family, and sharing his passion for history with anyone he meets.
One of our goals in learning about history is to make it “usable.” In other words, how can we take what we’ve learned about the past and apply it to today, or even to the future? Today, you’ll think about…
Globalization has distanced us from each other almost as much as it has connected us. It has meant the substitution of processed food for fresh, and digital experience for lived experience. Families have…
It’s easy to forget the role we each play in the global economy. Even something as seemingly simple as a t-shirt represents the ways in which the production and distribution of everyday goods connects…
Globalization refers to how the world has become more connected economically, politically, socially, and culturally over time. Although this has been happening for a long time, the last fifty years or…
Both the Cold War and the fall of great empires began even before the last shots of the Second World War were fired. The 1940s and 1950s saw a series of increasingly tense confrontations between Western…
The Holocaust was the horrific murder of millions of Jews and other persecuted groups in Nazi-occupied areas of Europe during the Second World War. Fascist ideas applied to age-old hatreds convinced many…
World War II is generally considered the most devastating global conflict in history. But it is also considered a “good war.” How can both of these things be true? This video will help us understand these…
Today, we call the period from 1919 to the late 1930s “the interwar period.” The bitterness felt by many nations after World War I helped cause the deadliest war in human history. In the lead up to that…
Historians don’t agree on one definitive cause of the First World War. There were a lot of different factors at play. Perhaps the most common explanation was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand…
The First World War (1914-1918) came at the end of a complex era. The long nineteenth century had seen the rise of democracies, increased economic production, and reforms, but also empire, racism, and…
Capitalism and socialism are competing ideas about how we should organize our economies. They grew during this time period, and there are both fans and critics of each of these systems.
Imperialism—the system in which the powerful controlled the weak—remained in place during this time period. Power was increasingly about the production and distribution of the many new industrial…
The Industrial Revolution began in 1750 when a shortage of wood and an abundance of coal deposits in Great Britain created a new reliance on fossil fuels for heating and cooking. British engineers discovered…
You’ve probably noticed that the word “revolution” is loosely applied to just about any aspect of life that undergoes a big change. However, politics in the long nineteenth century certainly deserves this…
You might expect a 164-year period called “the long nineteenth century” to feel like a long time. But democracy, industry, imperialism, and a growing human population meant change was happening more rapidly…
Old ideas like credit got a reboot in Era 5. Along with some other financial innovations, credit really changed the way the European economy worked. Building on ideas from the Islamic world and India,…
Slavery has existed since some of the earliest human societies, but the transatlantic slave trade was unprecedented in its scale and violence. Rather than being part of a different social class, enslaved…
Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Americas created new pathways of exchange between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas—for better or for worse. These exchanges gave the Irish potatoes and the Italians tomatoes…
There are many different stories people tell about the Mongols. These stories are partially true, but also incomplete. While the Mongols were tough, mobile warriors, and were brutal at times, they were…
The first truly Global Age—full of both prosperity and tragedy—forever altered the course of human history. The already massive, complex trading systems within the Americas and Afro-Eurasia became linked…
We think the “The Dark Ages” has a branding problem, as historians have long debated how the Middle Ages in Europe should be characterized. The sun shone as brightly then as it does now, but the number…
As the Islamic belief system spread beyond the borders of a single state, Muslims moved around as religious pilgrims, as missionaries, and traders. Islamic societies occupied territory at the crossroads…
Sometimes things go wrong. Empires fall and societies collapse. But how this happens may have been up to each society. In other words, were empires and societies pushed, or did they jump?
All empires eventually fall, or at a minimum are radically altered into someone else’s idea of an empire. Two of history’s most fascinating empires, China’s Han dynasty in the east and the Roman Empire…
In this era, we learn that both states and networks can collapse—and frequently did! Collapse could occur for many reasons. It could be brief and insignificant, or it could dramatically change people’s…