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- As Prof. Green explained, where you begin a story "depends on what kind of story you want to tell. If the AP wants to tell the story of the history of nation-states, then maybe ca. 1200 is the 'correct' place for them to do so... [But] I want to tell stories about how humans have dispersed and innovated and reconnected repeatedly. I trained as a Europeanist and a Medievalist. For many historical questions... you need a viewpoint with a larger perspective."
- As Prof. Green explained, where you begin a story "depends on what kind of story you want to tell. If the AP wants to tell the story of the history of nation-states, then maybe ca. 1200 is the 'correct' place for them to do so... [But] I want to tell stories about how humans have dispersed and innovated and reconnected repeatedly. I trained as a Europeanist and a Medievalist. For many historical questions... you need a viewpoint with a larger perspective."
In June 2018, the College Board announced planned changes to the Advanced Placement (AP) World History curriculum. Among them, they said that the course would begin in 1450 CE. Nothing from before then would be covered by the curriculum. Historians reacted swiftly to this news, with teachers and researchers pointing out how this could (and probably would) promote a Eurocentric view of modern history, relegating to the margins the rich and varied pasts of the other 5 inhabited continents. Those who study the period before 1450 CE - the vast majority of human history - also noted that the erasure of that period from the curriculum minimizes the complicated lines of development that have led to our own 21st century.
In the face of this criticism, just this week the College Board updated the framework for the AP World History curriculum by pushing the start date back to 1200 CE. Prof. Mary Beth Norton who is the current President of the American Historical Association (AHA) and a specialist in American colonial history, was encouraged by the change.
But not everyone was so impressed.
Via email, Prof. Monica Green, a historian of medicine at Arizona State University who specializes in both the Global History of Health and the European Middle Ages, said that the choice of the year 1200 CE seemed a bit odd to historians of Europe, the Islamicate world, or for anyone who studies global climate history. Prof. Green explained that the study of the premodern world is at a particularly exciting crossroads. She wrote:
"The 'paleosciences' are refining, and in many cases overturning, a lot of 'established wisdom' in a lot of areas. Likewise, the traditional historicist fields—document-based history, but also archeology—are themselves being transformed because processes like digitization are making whole bodies of data accessible in new ways, allowing us to see connections we’ve never seen before.... Not that all that new work can be incorporated into the high school curriculum immediately. But it does suggest that, if anything, we should be making our definitions of World History more capacious now, not less so."
This date is also puzzling because of the seeming haste with which this decision was made. She continued, "last month they were sure that 'ca. 1450' was the way to go. This month, with no discernible input from scholars of the pre-modern world or anthropologists, they’re just as certain that 'ca. 1200' is the correct path." Indeed, although the current World History Development Committee includes dedicated teachers and scholars across global history, it stands out that none are specialists in the premodern world.
Even the reaction to the new change by the American Historical Association's president is revealing here. As reported by Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed, Prof. Norton from the AHA said "the key point is to have sufficient time before 1450 for teachers to address world historical developments prior to European exploration and expansion"
But how do we know this change makes a difference if scholars of the premodern Mediterranean - let alone Asia and Africa and the Americas - weren't consulted? And doesn't showing the pre-history of "European exploration and expansion" actually just place more emphasis on the Western-centric focus of this "global history?"
In other words, as I've written about before, broadening our view of the past, asking new questions, should be understood as embedded into the study of history itself. As Prof. Green so elegantly concluded, the history of the premodern world including, but extending beyond, Europe "is a world history that everyone should know. We are all inheritors of the global human experience."
This is something those who study the Global Premodern, who continue to demonstrate in their teaching and research how small the world really is, have been talking about for years. And this is something that the students who take the new AP World History exam will inevitably encounter in college, that encounter itself an experience the College Board will have left them sadly unprepared for.
