Free ebookWorld History in 50 Turning Points

Course Description

World History in 50 Turning Points is a practical ebook course in basic studies that helps you make sense of the past by focusing on moments when societies changed direction. Instead of memorizing dates, you learn how historians read change through evidence, comparison, and cause and effect, building a clearer understanding of why the modern world looks the way it does.

Progressively, you explore how farming created surplus and supported the first large settlements, how cities and writing enabled early states, and how bronze technologies and horse-based mobility reshaped warfare across long distances. You then connect universal religions and ethical traditions to new social orders, and see how coinage, markets, and interregional trade expanded economic life across Afro-Eurasia. As the narrative scales up, you examine classical empires and the politics of governing vast territories, along with the shock of pandemic disease and demographic reversal that reordered labor, power, and belief.

The course shows how military and maritime innovations altered global balances, from gunpowder and fortifications to oceanic navigation that built a truly global maritime network. You trace the Columbian Exchange and ecological transformation, the transatlantic slave trade and racialized systems of labor, and the ways scientific inquiry, print culture, and new publics of knowledge changed how information traveled and authority was challenged. Industrialization and the fossil-fuel energy breakthrough reveal why production, cities, and climate impacts accelerated, while new imperialism and the global reordering of power set the stage for world wars and mass mobilization.

Finally, you link decolonization and the rise of new nation-states to the Cold War as a global system of alliances, revolutions, and proxy conflicts, and you assess how digital networks continue to accelerate global interdependence. By the end, you will be able to read world history as an interconnected story, recognize patterns that repeat across regions, and apply historical thinking to current events, work, and civic life.

Start World History in 50 Turning Points today and build a strong, confident foundation in history with an engaging, evidence-based approach.