World History Class with Mr. Lutz

This final episode discusses how the world experiences radical technological changes, especially in the way we communicate and consume information, every few years with effects that are constantly being understood bit by bit. We, as a global community, rely on both raw materials and finished products from individuals all over our planet. These technological developments and economic exchanges, paired with greater personal freedoms, have reshaped how we live inside and outside of our homes through a more globalized culture. World population continues to grow, reaching 8.1 billion by 2024. Increased consumption of resources, particularly fossil fuels, by our ever expanding population and global economy, has altered the global climate. This has resulted in more and more natural disasters, leading to new waves of migration, political turbulence, and cooperative efforts attempted at limiting human impact on the environment.

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This episode explains how by 1991, nations throughout Europe and Asia were rebuilt along very different lines of democratic capitalism or authoritarian communism. These ideologies created material advances to varying degrees of success. However, communism has done so at the cost of countless lives and personal freedoms while capitalism has set economic growth as its top priority, to the cost of our natural environment’s ability to manage itself. Former European colonies have secured independence for themselves and the empires of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have now collapsed. America stands at the end of the Cold War as the world’s singular superpower.

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 In this episode you will learn how by 1945, European nation-states are left devastated after the First and Second World Wars, no longer able to maintain control over their far-flung empires, and relying on foreign support to help them rebuild. Political extremism has led to the approximate deaths of 75 million individuals as a result of World Wars I and II. Political revolutions in old states and the world wars have resulted in their demise and authoritarian forms of communism begin to emerge and present themselves as a legitimate rivalry to the popular systems of liberal democracy and capitalism found in the West.

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This episode will discuss how by 1900, China had been divided into Spheres of Influence after agreeing to several so-called “unequal treaties” with several European countries, the United States, and Japan. By that time, they were halfway through what they called their “century of humiliation.” India, once the leading global exporter of cotton textiles, had become a de-industrialized society and was now a British colony devoted to the growth of cash crops. According to historian Robert Marks, by the early 1800s, India had now contributed about 2% of world manufacturing output, China 7%, and Europe and the United States combined for 80%. Western militaries now dominated those of the rest of the world and it was necessary for non-westerners to rethink their ways or fall behind.

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This episode will help you understand that by 1900, some of the most dramatic transformations in human history have taken place that still largely shape our modern world. The environment no longer places limits on societal potential the way it used to. Cities are popping up throughout the Western world and people are flocking there to work in new industrial jobs, abandoning their traditional ways of working. New technologies and machinery are being developed that transform everything relating to how humans work, live, and consume. Western states now push for free trade that allows them to exchange with states in ways mercantilism never allowed, helping them to dominate economic and political affairs around the globe. Inequalities between social classes have grown larger and new ideologies develop that seek to radically transform society.

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In this episode, we’ll come to understand that by 1900, the Americas had become almost entirely independent of European rule. The rights of individuals are now protected by states (though not necessarily for women or people of color). Absolute monarchy has largely ended and some rulers have been violently overthrown by their own people, both at home and abroad in their colonies. Slavery has been widely abolished in the Western world, but its after effects remain. Societies are imagining themselves into new communities defined by national identity that would present their own new and unique benefits and challenges.

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We’ll close out our study of this era by learning how an entirely new sect of Christianity, Protestantism, had emerged and was now competing with Roman Catholicism for influence in European state affairs. Meanwhile, the emerging Scientific Revolution was calling preconceived beliefs about the workings of the natural world into question. The Roman Catholic states of Portugal and Spain had made a push to globalize their faith, spreading it throughout their empires and trade posts in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Tensions between Shia and Sunni had flared intensely during the era and a new religion was forming in India that argued all Hindus and Muslims were all children of God. 

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In this episode you’ll find out how by 1750, Europeans will effectively have control over the Indian Ocean, and the newly established Atlantic, and Pacific routes of exchange that had not existed when our studies of this unit began in 1450. Their economic practices will have tremendously negative effects for people of the Americas, most of Africa, and various parts of Asia. Yet China and Japan largely stood to benefit from much of these developments while many Asian merchant communities in the Indian Ocean continued to thrive as well.

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This episode will shed light on how by about 1750, European empires spread across a large part of the Americas, the Aztec and Inca empires were no more, the Ottomans had reached and were now moving past their high point, Russia was expanding eastward, India had been unified, and China was expanding westward. Long story short, huge, land-based and sea-based empires were on the rise and this was because of not only military advancements like gunpowder weapons and professional militaries, but also streamlined bureaucratic systems and societal structures had been put into place to keep the government and society running smoothly.

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World History Class with Mr. Lutz officially returns! This episode is intended to provide a narrative of how we can understand developments in world history from about 1200 to 1450. In particular, for students of AP World History, think of this as a combined story of what happens in Unit 1 and Unit 2 of your studies.

The general argument made here, which is to be understood, debated, and reinterpreted, is around 1200 we’ve got human societies scattered all over Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. In Afro-Eurasia these societies have been lightly connected by trade routes that have both become stronger and weaker over. But by 1450, there have been greater connections within Afro-Eurasia, leading to more goods, technologies, ideas, and diseases being exchanged. Societies in the Americas have grown stronger and mostly improved connections between themselves as well. Ultimately, it is the strengthening of states that has helped to improve connections between societies during this time.

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