This is just a reminder note to complete your WHAP Summer Reading assignments before school starts. School begins Thursday, August 27. The assignments and information you need for this course are posted to the right of this page. It will greatly help you understand the class and the beginning discussions will center on these assignments. Further instructions to register for the site and submit your first post are located on this page–scroll down until you find ”WHAP Students Welcome” and “Summer Reading So Far” posts. I will also be checking notebooks and comments as per the instructions. If you have already completed the posts and the assignments, good job! You just made your life easier! I have read your comments and am looking forward to discussing the themes at length this year! Please email if you have questions, Mrs. S.
NOTE: There are different copies of the World History text being used by this class-it is unavoidable. If you have the regular 3rd edition, the chapters will correspond to the assignments well. If you have the AP 4th edition, the chapters will be 1-3 but with different titles than on the summer reading assignment sheet. I’m sure you can figure this out on your own. You aren’t missing any information if you have one text or the other–the chapters were reconfigured with the more recent editions–they tend to be longer.
Assignment 1: a. A society needs a surplus of materials essential to survival in order to become a civilization. This is because a surplus of things such as food supplies, lumber, stone and other essential goods allow for specialization in occupations, a social system or organization, some sort of government system, trade with other societies, and usually a written system. b. The western model of civilization is specific in that it focuses on buildings, cities, writing and technology as symbols of the civilizations strength and validity. c. The non-western model focuses more on patterns of social development, instead of structures and technology. d. The differences in these models tends to be cause by westerners tendency towards ethnocentrism and the feeling of their superiority. e. Some issues involved in using “civilization” as an organizing principle in world history is that it only includes societies that qualify as civilizations, but this distinction can sometimes be hazy, and though some groups of peoples may not be considered civilizations, they may still offer much to study in the context of world history.