World History B — World Wars, Cold War and the Contemporary World is the second semester of Grade 10 Modern World History, built on California History-Social Science standards 10.6-10.11 and the CCSS literacy standards for history/social studies.
Four units: The Broken Peace and the Rise of Totalitarianism, The Second World War and the Holocaust, The Cold War World, and Nation-Building and Globalization in the Contemporary World. The course is taught as world history, with genuine weight on Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East: the May Fourth Movement and the mandates beside Versailles; Nanjing and Manila beside Stalingrad; Korea, Vietnam, the Congo, Chile and Egypt in the Cold War; and case studies of nation-building in Africa, Mexico, China and the Middle East. It treats the Holocaust, the Terror Famine, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides accurately and with care, and connects to California’s Armenian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Iranian, Jewish and Arab communities. Students write a document-based argument essay, build a digital-history presentation on how the Second World War is witnessed and remembered, take part in a structured academic controversy on the Soviet collapse, and write a comparative research paper on nation-building.
Sources: OpenStax World History, Volume 2: from 1400 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; referenced, not reproduced) as the reference text, and public-domain primary sources: the Fourteen Points, the Treaty of Versailles and Covenant of the League of Nations, the Balfour Declaration, poetry and prose published before 1930, U.S. presidential addresses, the Atlantic Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, the Nuremberg trial record and U.S. statutes. Works still under copyright — among them Elie Wiesel’s Night, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, George Orwell’s novels and John Hersey’s Hiroshima — are summarized, never reproduced, and students are told where to read them.
Curriculum
- 4 Sections
- 20 Lessons
- Lifetime
- Unit 1: The Broken Peace and the Rise of Totalitarianism5
- 1.1Making Peace in 1919 — Versailles, the Fourteen Points and the League50 mins
- 1.2Redrawing the Map — Borders, Refugees and Money after 191950 mins
- 1.3Seminar — Things Fall Apart: Disillusionment after the Great War50 mins
- 1.4Workshop — Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Dictatorship50 mins
- 1.5Performance Task — From Broken Peace to Dictatorship: A Document-Based Argument150 mins
- Unit 2: The Second World War and the Holocaust5
- 2.1Roads to War — Empire-Building and Appeasement in the 1930s50 mins
- 2.2Theaters, Turning Points and Leaders of a Global War50 mins
- 2.3Seminar — The Holocaust: Ideology, Perpetrators, Victims, Rescuers100 mins
- 2.4Workshop — Counting the Cost: The Human Toll of the Second World War50 mins
- 2.5Performance Task — Witness and Memory: A Digital-History Presentation200 mins
- Unit 3: The Cold War World5
- 3.1A World Remade — Yalta, the Bomb, the UN and the New Alliances50 mins
- 3.2Containment — Aid, Alliances and Hot Wars in a Cold War50 mins
- 3.3Seminar — The Chinese Revolution from Civil War to Tiananmen50 mins
- 3.4Workshop — Nationalism, Israel and Palestine in the Modern Middle East50 mins
- 3.5Performance Task — Structured Academic Controversy: Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?150 mins
- Unit 4: Nation-Building and Globalization in the Contemporary World5
- 4.1After Empire — Decolonisation and Nation-Building in Africa50 mins
- 4.2Case Studies — Mexico and China since 198050 mins
- 4.3Seminar — Do Today’s Trends Serve Freedom and Democracy?50 mins
- 4.4Workshop — The Connected World: Trade, Migration and the Information Revolution50 mins
- 4.5Performance Task — Comparative Research Paper: Building Nations since 1945200 mins
Instructor
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