Learning List has reviewed Perfection Learning’s Patterns of World History, Combined Volume, With Sources, 2nd Edition. This comprehensive product supports instruction in Advanced Placement (AP) World History courses. Content is available in print and eBook formats and includes additional online resources. Using broad historical patterns as an organizational structure (e.g., path breaking technological innovations), the text presents a narrative of world history that supports contextual understanding of the events and innovations that have shaped the world.
Core content is presented in six parts organized in terms of chronological periods: (1) From Human Origins to Early Agricultural Centers: Prehistory-600 BCE, (2) The Age of Empires and Visionaries: 600 BCE-600 CE, (3) The Formation of Religious Civilizations: 600-1450 CE, (4) Interactions Across the Globe: 1450-1750, (5) The Origins of Modernity: 1750-1900, and (6) From Three Modernities to One: 1914 to present. Each part begins with a two-page overview of the period and and its key patterns, a timeline, and a set of “Thinking Like a Historian Questions” to guide students’ reading (e.g., “How was each religious civilization of the period 600-1450 unique? How were these civilizations comparable?”).
Chapters end with a “Against the Grain” essays that provide opposing or contradictory narratives related to the period of study (e.g., Thor Heyerdahl’s theory that early Polynesians were descended from Peruvians) with questions to support analysis and discussion. End-of-chapter activities include “Patterns of Evidence,” which presents a set of textual and visual primary sources. A short introduction frames the context for each source, and each source is followed by several “Working With Sources” document-based questions.
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Information in this section is provided by or adapted from Perfection Learning.
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