Homeschool · Diploma track · Grade 10

World History: free lessons and course outline

A full year of world history for grade 10, built to be the student's whole course in the subject. The eleven units map one to one onto California's eleven grade 10 standards, so nothing in the state's content list is left uncovered. History here is taught through documents rather than summaries of documents, because the skill being built is reading a source and working out what it can and cannot prove. Each lesson teaches one idea, works it through on a real text, and asks you to do the same, with a full model answer for every question. Every source quoted is public domain.

DIPLOMA TRACK CA HSS 10.1-10.11 GRADE 10 MODEL ANSWERS 76 LESSONS 870 PRACTICE QUESTIONS 6 ESSAY PROMPTS None. This is a complete course and does not assume other instruction.

This course is built directly against the California History-Social Science content standards for grade 10, which run from 10.1 to 10.11 and contain 48 specific sub-standards. Each of the eleven units below covers one standard, and the number of lessons in a unit is set by how much that standard actually requires rather than by a uniform template. The year begins where the state's list begins, with the Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian roots of the political ideas the rest of the course watches being fought over, and it ends with globalization and the information revolution. The through-line is causation: what actually makes a revolution happen, why industrialization began where it did, how an empire is justified by the people running it, and how a war nobody wanted became unavoidable.

U1Unit 1: Foundations of Western Political Thought5 lessons
U2Unit 2: The Age of Democratic Revolutions8 lessons
U3Unit 3: The Industrial Revolution9 lessons
U4Unit 4: The New Imperialism7 lessons
U5Unit 5: The First World War7 lessons
U6Unit 6: The Effects of the First World War6 lessons
U7Unit 7: The Rise of Totalitarian Governments6 lessons
U8Unit 8: The Second World War8 lessons
U9Unit 9: The Post-War World and the Cold War10 lessons
U10Unit 10: Nation-Building in the Contemporary World5 lessons
U11Unit 11: Globalization and the Information Revolution5 lessons

Every lesson, unit by unit

U1 is free to read below. The other units open with a free month or a paid plan.

U1 Unit 1: Foundations of Western Political ThoughtFREE

U2 Unit 2: The Age of Democratic Revolutions

2.1 The Enlightenment
2.2 Four philosophers
2.3 Magna Carta to 1689
2.4 The Declaration and the Bill of Rights
2.5 The Rights of Man
2.6 The American Revolution and its spread
2.7 The French Revolution
2.8 Napoleon and nationalism

U3 Unit 3: The Industrial Revolution

3.1 Why England first
3.2 Steam, iron and new energy
3.3 The factory and time discipline
3.4 Cities and the sanitary crisis
3.5 The evolution of work
3.6 The end of the slave trade
3.7 Conditions for growth
3.8 Capitalism and its critics
3.9 Romanticism

U4 Unit 4: The New Imperialism

4.1 The drive to empire
4.2 Means as well as motive
4.3 The map of empire
4.4 How empire justified itself
4.5 The view from the colonized
4.6 Resistance and Adwa
4.7 Anticolonial nationalism

U5 Unit 5: The First World War

5.1 Long-term causes
5.2 July 1914
5.3 The Western Front
5.4 The other theaters
5.5 Russia leaves the war
5.6 American entry
5.7 Human cost and genocide

U6 Unit 6: The Effects of the First World War

6.1 The aims at Paris
6.2 The Treaty of Versailles
6.3 The end of four empires
6.4 Borders and minorities
6.5 Disillusionment
6.6 The war in art

U7 Unit 7: The Rise of Totalitarian Governments

7.1 Russia 1917
7.2 Civil war and its consequences
7.3 Stalin's rise
7.4 Collectivization and famine
7.5 Italian fascism
7.6 Nazism

U8 Unit 8: The Second World War

8.1 Three drives for empire
8.2 Appeasement
8.3 American isolationism
8.4 Allies and Axis
8.5 Turning points
8.6 Leaders and decisions
8.7 The Holocaust
8.8 The human cost

U9 Unit 9: The Post-War World and the Cold War

9.1 The shift in power
9.2 Causes of the Cold War
9.3 Truman Doctrine
9.4 The Marshall Plan
9.5 Deterrence and proxy war
9.6 China and Mao
9.7 Revolts in the bloc
9.8 The Middle East
9.9 The Soviet collapse
9.10 The United Nations

U10 Unit 10: Nation-Building in the Contemporary World

10.1 Decolonization
10.2 Inherited structures
10.3 Building a state
10.4 Partition in South Asia
10.5 Current trends

U11 Unit 11: Globalization and the Information Revolution

11.1 Integration into the world economy
11.2 Containers and supply chains
11.3 Winners and losers
11.4 The information revolution
11.5 What has and has not changed

Keep going in the full World History course

All of U1 (Unit 1: Foundations of Western Political Thought) is free to everyone, with no account. The course has 76 lessons, each with worked examples and practice problems that come with full solutions. A free account can also start a free month of the whole course, with no card.

Open this lesson in the course See the whole course