Hocbigg - World History
Summary
The World History curriculum is a comprehensive education in World History, designed for self-directed study using online materials.
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World History Core Curriculum
Foundations of Historical Thinking
This subject introduces the core methods of historical inquiry, teaching learners how to interrogate primary evidence, trace historiographical debates, and construct evidence-based arguments.
Thinking About History (Sarah Maza) - A readable introduction to how historians formulate questions, evaluate evidence, and interpret the past across social, cultural, and global frameworks.
Reading Like a Historian (Digital Inquiry Group) - Free document-based inquiry lessons that teach historical reading skills: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading.
World History to 1500
This subject covers human history from Paleolithic origins and the Neolithic agricultural revolution through classical empires, post-classical trans-regional networks, and medieval Afro-Eurasian and American societies.
World History, Volume 1: to 1500 (OpenStax) - A peer-reviewed, open-access textbook providing a balanced global survey of early human societies, river valley civilizations, and classical to medieval exchange networks.
History of the World to 1500 CE (Columbia University / Richard Bulliet) - A complete 26-lecture undergraduate university survey covering early agriculture, classical states, the spread of world religions, and nomadic empires.
World History Project (Khan Academy) - An interactive, open-access curriculum emphasizing thematic global frames, interregional trade networks, and comparative political development.
World History from 1400 to the Present
This subject covers the emergence of the modern interconnected world, including transoceanic contact, the Columbian Exchange, gunpowder empires, political and industrial revolutions, imperialism, global conflict, and 20th-century decolonization.
World History, Volume 2: from 1400 (OpenStax) - A comprehensive open-access textbook tracing the early modern era, global empires, industrialization, the world wars, and post-war globalization.
The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Robert B. Marks) - A concise, non-Eurocentric analysis of how the biological old regime, Asian trade circuits, European expansion, and industrialization shaped the modern global economy.
History of the World Since 1500 CE (Columbia University / Richard Bulliet) - A 20-lecture undergraduate course examining European oceanic expansion, early modern Asian empires, the Atlantic slave trade, and 20th-century geopolitical transformations.
The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910 (Coursera / University of Virginia) - An audit-accessible lecture series focused on the political and industrial revolutions of the long nineteenth century and their worldwide impacts.
The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910 (Coursera / University of Virginia) - A structured audit-accessible course analyzing the world wars, ideological confrontations of the Cold War, decolonization, and contemporary globalization.