Grade 10 · Christian · NGSS/CCSS-aligned
This is a full-year world history course for 10th grade that skips the "march through centuries region by region" approach. Instead it asks one big question over and over, in different costumes: when things connect — trade, ideas, disease, power — who ends up ahead and who ends up behind, and did anyone actually plan it that way? Your child will read real historical documents (letters, laws, propaganda posters, speeches) and argue from them, not just memorize dates. By the end, the goal is that they can look at a historical situation they've never seen before and say which of the course's recurring patterns explains it — and where that explanation runs out of road.
The whole year, in plain English. Tap any unit to see every skill inside, nothing is hidden.
This opens the course by showing that the world was already tightly connected — through trade, religion, and conquest — centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic. Your child will trace the Silk Roads, Indian Ocean trade, and Trans-Saharan routes, look at the Mongol Empire as the era's biggest connector and disruptor, and study the Black Death as a disease that spread along the same roads merchants used.
Given a thematic map of Afro-Eurasia c. 1300, students will trace and label the three major trade networks (Silk Roads, Indian Ocean, Trans-Saharan) and identify at least two goods characteristic of each.
Students will explain how the tribute system functioned as a mechanism of imperial control, distinguishing it from direct territorial administration, using the Yuan or Mali empire as the case.
Given two accounts of Mongol rule (one Persian, one Chinese chronicle excerpt), students will compare how each source characterizes Mongol governance and infer what each author's position explains about the difference.
Students will classify a list of historical developments (e.g., spread of gunpowder, spread of bubonic plague, spread of paper money, spread of a specific religious practice) as primarily cultural diffusion, technological diffusion, or pandemic diffusion, and justify borderline cases.
Students will infer, from mortality and trade-route data for the Black Death, why the disease spread faster along trade corridors than across regions without trade contact, without being told the mechanism directly.
Given a contemporary case of a global supply-chain disruption (e.g., a shipping-lane blockage or a modern pandemic) that was NOT discussed in class, students will generalize the unit's network-effects principle (connection produces unintended, unplanned winners and losers) and apply it to explain the new case.
Students will evaluate a claim ('The Mongols were purely destructive') against a 5-6 source document set, determining which sources support, complicate, or contradict the claim, and produce a written argument that takes a defensible position using at least two source types.
Students will recall the definition of empire and correctly identify three examples of land-based empires operating in Afro-Eurasia c. 1200-1450 (Mongol, Mali, Yuan/Ming or Delhi Sultanate).
This unit asks how sustained contact between the Americas and Europe/Africa after 1492 produced huge, unplanned consequences — mass death from disease, forced-labor economies, a trade system spanning three continents. Your child will work with conflicting accounts from European, Indigenous American, and West African points of view, and the unit deliberately does not resolve them into one clean story.
Given a map of Atlantic trade routes and a list of items (crops, animals, disease pathogens, people), students correctly sort each item into 'Old World to New World' or 'New World to Old World' as taught in the worked example. This is a factual recall/pattern-matching task, not evidence of understanding why direction is fixed. That reasoning is assessed separately by the companion objective below.
Given an unfamiliar item (a crop, animal, or pathogen not used in any prior worked example or practice set) and a brief note on where it was domesticated or first endemic, students correctly determine its direction of exchange and justify the judgment using domestication/endemic-origin logic (e.g., 'this animal was domesticated in Eurasia thousands of years before 1492, so it could only have moved Old World to New World') rather than by resemblance to a memorized category.
Students explain why the demographic collapse of Indigenous American populations after 1492 resulted primarily from disease rather than from direct violence, citing epidemiological reasoning (lack of prior exposure/immunity) rather than only citing death totals.
Students compare encomienda and chattel slavery as forced-labor systems, identifying at least two structural similarities (labor coercion, economic extraction for a colonial power) and at least two structural differences (legal status of the laborer, hereditability of status).
Given a primary source excerpt describing colonial trade policy, students infer whether the policy reflects mercantilist logic (colonies exist to enrich the mother country) even when the source never uses the word 'mercantilism.'
Students analyze a triangular trade diagram to explain how profit was generated at each leg of the voyage (Europe to West Africa, West Africa to Americas, Americas to Europe), attributing specific goods and their economic function to each leg.
Students construct a written comparison of how a European colonizer's account and a West African or Indigenous account describe the same historical event (e.g., an encounter, a labor arrangement, a trade transaction), identifying which details each author includes, omits, or emphasizes and explaining why the author's position might account for that difference.
Presented with a case of economic exploitation from an entirely different historical period not covered in this course (e.g., a resource-extraction economy the student has not studied), students determine whether mercantilist logic is present, absent, or only partially present, and justify the judgment using the definitional features of mercantilism taught in this unit.
Given a novel dataset or timeline (e.g., population estimates from a region/period not studied in this unit, such as a Pacific island contact scenario), students generalize whether the pattern of contact, demographic collapse, and forced-labor economy documented for the Atlantic World applies, and identify what additional evidence would be needed to decide.
Students evaluate whether the claim 'individual actors in a forced-labor system can be morally blameless while the system itself is evil' is defensible, using specific evidence about how encomienda or chattel slavery operated (legal codification, institutional routine, intergenerational scale) rather than general statements about morality.
Students recall the definitions of Columbian Exchange, demographic collapse, mercantilism, encomienda, chattel slavery, and triangular trade well enough to use each term correctly in a written sentence about the Atlantic World.
This unit compares the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions on one shared question: who actually gained legal rights, and who didn't, once the speeches were over. It starts with direct teaching of unfamiliar words — natural rights, popular sovereignty, social contract — because none of that has come up yet in the course.
Students state, from memory, the definitions of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the social contract, and correctly attribute each to its associated Enlightenment thinker (Locke, Rousseau).
Students classify specific clauses from the Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Haitian Declaration of Independence as expressing natural-rights, popular-sovereignty, or neither idea.
Given a founding-document excerpt and a contemporaneous legal document (a slave code or a property-qualification voting law) from the same society, students identify the specific point of contradiction between the document's rhetoric and the legal condition it describes.
Students explain why the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery immediately while the U.S. Revolution did not, citing at least two specific structural factors (demographic ratio of enslaved to free population; economic dependence of planters on enslaved labor) rather than a general cultural explanation.
Students compare the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions along a single shared dimension, which specific group gained legal rights and which did not, and generate a general statement about the relationship between pre-revolutionary economic structure and post-revolutionary outcome that holds across all three cases.
Students differentiate nationalism as a mobilizing political idea from patriotism or general national pride, by identifying who a specific nationalist text explicitly excludes from the nation it defines.
Given a previously unseen founding or revolutionary document from a society and period not covered in this unit (e.g., a Latin American independence declaration), students apply the rhetoric-vs-structural-condition analytic frame developed in this unit to predict which groups likely did and did not gain rights, and identify what additional evidence would be needed to confirm the prediction.
Students execute the structural comparison chart procedure (who led, who was excluded before, who was excluded after) for a fourth revolution-era document set provided independently, without teacher modeling on that specific document set.
Students draft and revise a comparative thesis statement for the summative essay that names a specific group and states whether that group's legal status changed consistently with, or contrary to, the revolution's founding rhetoric, incorporating Unit 2 forced-labor vocabulary as evidentiary support.
This unit holds two true things at once: industrialization created real new wealth, and it created new kinds of poverty that the old political language (rights, sovereignty) wasn't built to describe — until people bent that language to cover it. It opens with three days of direct teaching on capital, wage labor, and social class as one connected system, because everything else in the unit and two later units depends on that.
Given a diagram of a factory owner's capital and a worker's labor, students correctly label which party owns the means of production and which sells labor for a wage.
Students classify a set of six historical figures (factory owner, mill worker, small shopkeeper, sharecropper, land-owning aristocrat, factory foreman) into the social-class categories taught in Lesson 3, citing each person's relationship to capital as the basis for classification.
Using two primary-source factory accounts from different decades or countries, students explain why a single generalization about 'factory conditions' is unsupported by the evidence, citing the specific dates and locations of each source.
Given a new primary source describing labor conditions in a country not covered in class (e.g., Belgium or Japan), students infer whether the source is more consistent with early or late-stage industrialization based on the mechanisms taught (capital source, regulation level, urbanization rate) without being told which stage it represents.
Students compare Adam Smith's and Karl Marx/Engels's accounts of the same factory evidence, identifying the specific mechanism each theorist proposes to explain or resolve the condition described.
Students explain why reformers and radicals in this unit used the natural-rights vocabulary of Unit 3's revolutions to argue for labor protections, citing at least one specific rights claim and the specific labor condition it was applied to.
Given partial economic and geographic data (coal deposits, colonial capital inflows, existing textile trade volume) for three countries, students generate a ranked explanation of why Britain industrialized first, identifying which factor was necessary versus merely contributing.
Students construct a source-based written argument taking a position on whether reform, revolution, or unregulated growth was the response the evidence best supports, integrating at least three primary/secondary sources they themselves select and sort from an unsorted summative packet, and one paragraph connecting the argument to Unit 3's natural-rights vocabulary.
Students recall the definitions of capital, wage labor, social class, and urbanization from memory on a closed-note check.
This treats imperialism as a system with actual moving parts, not a list of countries and colonies. The core claim: imperialism fuses Unit 3's nationalism with Unit 4's industrial competition, dressed up in the language of national greatness and, increasingly, racial hierarchy.
Given a short case description of a territory (e.g., Egypt, the Congo, Korea), state whether the mechanism of control described is a concession, a protectorate, or direct rule, and identify the textual clue that signals which.
Explain why a colonial administrator's description of a policy as 'mutually beneficial' and a colonized author's description of the same policy as extractive can both be accurate accounts of what happened, by naming what each account foregrounds and omits.
Given two primary sources on the same imperial policy (one colonizer, one colonized), identify at least two specific details that one source includes and the other omits, and state what including or omitting that detail does for the author's argument.
Recall the sequence of the Berlin Conference (1884-85) and state its stated purpose versus its actual effect on African political boundaries.
Construct a causal argument for why social Darwinism emerged as a popular justification for empire AFTER most territorial seizures were already underway, using the timeline evidence and economic motive evidence studied in this unit, rather than treating racial ideology as the unit's sole or first cause.
Compare the economic-motive explanation, the nationalist-competition explanation, and the racial-ideology explanation for imperial expansion, and produce a written argument stating which explanation the student weighs as most necessary (not merely contributing) for a specific case, with textual evidence.
Given a previously unseen 20th- or 21st-century case of a powerful state exercising indirect economic or political control over a weaker one (not covered in this unit), identify which imperial-era mechanism (concession-style resource extraction, protectorate-style political dependency, or direct administrative control) it most resembles, and justify the match with specific parallel features.
Given a resistance movement not studied in this unit's case examples (e.g., a movement from a region other than the ones covered in class), generate a plausible argument for why it succeeded, failed, or achieved partial goals, drawing on the categories of resistance strategy (armed conflict, diplomatic maneuvering, cultural preservation) studied in Lesson 8.
In a paired-source DBQ response, integrate evidence from both a colonizer's official justification and a colonized author's account to name the underlying economic or ideological mechanism, using Unit 4's vocabulary of capital and wage labor accurately.
This traces how the rivalries and alliances from Unit 5 escalated into a war that pulled in entire societies, and how fascism and totalitarianism became most dangerous not as fanatical belief but as routine bureaucratic policy. The unit's main tool is a test for telling a necessary cause from a merely contributing one, and it gets applied three times: to WWI's outbreak, to the rise of fascist institutions, and to the mechanics of the Holocaust.
Students can trace the specific treaty-obligation mechanism by which one alliance commitment (e.g., Germany's backing of Austria-Hungary) obligated a second power to act.
Students can classify a given candidate cause of WWI's outbreak (e.g., militarism, colonial rivalry) as necessary or contributing by applying the counterfactual removal test.
Given a full set of five candidate causes and evidence cards, students can rank the causes by necessity and justify the ranking with the counterfactual test in connected prose.
Students can name the specific persuasive technique (fear appeal, dehumanization, appeal to unity, bandwagon) used in an unfamiliar propaganda poster and cite the visual/textual evidence for it.
Students can identify the same named propaganda technique operating in both a historical WWI/WWII poster and a self-selected contemporary media example, with matched evidence for each.
Students can explain, using at least two cited pieces of primary-document evidence, how a specific ordinary bureaucratic role (e.g., railway scheduling, census registration) contributed to the mechanics of the Holocaust.
Students can identify a specific instance of individual or institutional resistance to genocide policy and explain what it reveals about the limits of the bureaucracy-as-full-explanation account.
Students can compare WWI and WWII home-front mobilization using a shared comparison framework and state a specific claim about what was structurally new versus repeated.
Students can evaluate a post-war data set (labor participation, taxation, conscription policy) to determine whether wartime government powers persisted or reverted after 1945, citing specific data points.
Given an unfamiliar historical conflict outside this unit's taught content, students can apply the necessary-vs-contributing counterfactual test to rank its causes, generalizing the method beyond WWI.
Students can recall the definitions of total war, propaganda, totalitarianism, fascism, genocide, and bureaucracy from memory without notes.
Students can write a five-paragraph causal argument essay that cites at least three causes of WWI, ranks them by necessity, and defends the ranking with textual evidence.
This holds two big stories together: the US-USSR standoff, and the collapse of European empires across Africa and Asia. Neither one fully makes sense alone — superpowers competed for new states' loyalty, and new states used that competition as leverage even while it limited their choices.
Given a map and timeline of decolonization in Africa and Asia 1945-1975, students will explain at least two distinct mechanisms (financial exhaustion from WWII, rising nationalist movements using WWII-era rhetoric) that ended formal European empire in a given case.
Students will correctly define and give an original example of 'non-alignment' distinct from 'neutrality' as used in Cold War diplomacy.
Students will classify a set of six Cold War conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, Congo, Nicaragua) as proxy wars or civil wars with external intervention, justifying the classification with at least one piece of textual evidence.
Students will recall the years and blocs involved in three named Cold War crises (Berlin Blockade, Cuban Missile Crisis, Korean War).
Given primary source excerpts from a superpower-aligned newspaper and a non-aligned nation's leader (e.g., Nehru, Nkrumah), students will compare how each source frames the same Cold War event and infer the underlying interest driving the framing.
Students will explain why economic dependency persisted after formal political independence in a decolonized nation, citing Unit 2's forced-labor/cash-crop economies and Unit 4's industrial-capital patterns as antecedent structures.
Given an unfamiliar decolonizing nation not covered in class (e.g., Guinea-Bissau, East Timor), students will construct an evidence-based argument for which explanatory pattern (forced-labor economy, industrial-capital extraction, ideological administration) best accounts for its post-independence trajectory, using only source packets provided.
Given a novel Cold War-era proxy conflict not studied in class (e.g., the Ogaden War), students will infer which superpower's interests were most served by intervention, using only the conflict's timeline and stated actors.
Students will critique a textbook passage's claim that decolonization was 'granted' by European powers, identifying what evidence the claim omits.
Students will organize evidence from three non-adjacent units (2, 4, 6) into a coherent written argument supporting one explanatory pattern for their chosen case-study nation.
This last unit isn't new content — it's the payoff. The first two weeks are cumulative review, but organized as sorting practice: given a historical episode, which of four course patterns (exchange network, revolution-vs-reform, industrial extraction, ideology-as-administration) explains it, and where does it break down? The second half applies that toolkit to unfamiliar modern cases — the WTO, the EU, migration crises, online-era nationalism — that were never taught with an answer key.
Given a short unfamiliar historical episode (pre-1991), correctly sort it into one of four course patterns (exchange network, revolution-vs-reform, industrial extraction, ideology-as-administration) and name the specific textual cue that signaled the match.
Recall the defining vocabulary term and one diagnostic mechanism for each of the four course patterns without notes.
Execute the four-question sorting protocol (What changed hands? Who decided? Who administered it? What broke down?) on a new case to generate a preliminary pattern hypothesis.
Explain why a given post-1991 case (e.g., the WTO dispute system, an EU regulatory fight, or a migration crisis) resists clean sorting into a single course pattern, citing at least two competing patterns and the specific evidence that supports each.
Compare the migration and displacement patterns of the contemporary period to the demographic collapse and forced-labor migration studied in Unit 2, identifying what is structurally similar and what is genuinely different (voluntary vs. coerced movement, disease vector vs. economic driver).
Infer which specific institution (WTO, IMF, EU, UN Security Council) is most limited by national sovereignty based on a short case description of that institution failing to enforce a decision, and justify the inference with a named mechanism of limitation.
Critique a classmate's pattern-identification argument by identifying one piece of evidence that better supports a different pattern than the one claimed, using the unit's evidence-based argument rubric.
Generate an original argument, using an unfamiliar post-1991 case never discussed in class, for which course pattern best explains it, citing specific evidence from at least three non-adjacent units and explicitly addressing where the chosen pattern's explanatory power breaks down.
Organize a written argument so that a claim about pattern-fit is followed by evidence drawn from named units and a linking explanation of how that evidence bears on the claim, distinguishing this structure from a list of facts about the case.
From the parent guide
This is a full-year world history course for 10th grade that skips the "march through centuries region by region" approach. Instead it asks one big question over and over, in different costumes: when things connect — trade, ideas, disease, power — who ends up ahead and who ends up behind, and did anyone actually plan it that way? Your child will read real historical documents (letters, laws, propaganda posters, speeches) and argue from them, not just memorize dates. By the end, the goal is that they can look at a historical situation they've never seen before and say which of the course's recurring patterns explains it — and where that explanation runs out of road.
Unit 1 · what to expect
This opens the course by showing that the world was already tightly connected — through trade, religion, and conquest — centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic. Your child will trace the Silk Roads, Indian Ocean trade, and Trans-Saharan routes, look at the Mongol Empire as the era's biggest connector and disruptor, and study the Black Death as a disease that spread along the same roads merchants used.
The full guide covers all 8 units: where kids get stuck, what to say, and how to tell it's working. Included with the course.
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