Global History 10

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This class is the second part of a two-year course addressing World History.  At the end of this year, you will be expected to take and to pass the New York State Regents Global History and Geography Exam.  You must pass this Regents Exam in order to graduate from high school.

This year, our class, will begin by reexamining the basis of modern world history-the creation of mankind, the early river civilizations of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile River Valleys, the classical civilizations of China, Greece, and Rome, the dark and uncertain times of the Middle Ages, and the rebirth of civilization at the hands of Absolute Monarchs.  We will then concentrate on the economic, political, religious, and philosophical tensions that wrote the remainder of our world’s history and created the triumphs, crises, and challenges that we face today.  We will observe challenges to traditional authority that threatened centuries of scientific norms and established monarchies.  We will experience the development of a new economic engine that drove millions to migrate, lifestyles to change, and nations to war.  We will witness the silent and deadly battles between fading and rising superpowers.  We will visit the divided cities, countries, and continents of the Cold War.  We will understand the forces that reunited the world with the hopes of democracy and that challenged the world with the realities of continued conflict and terrorism.  In the end, we will have understood the dangerous and demanding lives of scientists, philosophers, and revolutionaries who daringly questioned traditional thoughts and tyrants in a quest for freedom of mind, heart, and body.  We will have witnessed the use of fatally successful military technology and the rise of modern exploitative economies and empires.  We will have seen these empires decay and disappear at the hands of ethnocentric leaders, and we will have watched these nations being replaced by a troublesome, but more democratic world.  Simply stated, we will have experienced modern World History.