Speaker A
Hello, welcome back to Anti-Social Studies, I'm Emily Glankler and I'm so excited.
Explore how science and technology unified the globe in the 20th century, driving social, economic, and medical advancements from the 90s to today.
Key Takeaways
- Science and technology have played a crucial role in unifying the world socially and economically.
- Communication and transportation innovations have eliminated geographic barriers, enabling instant global connections.
- Medical advancements, often driven by crises, have significantly improved global health and life expectancy.
- Globalization in the 20th century mirrors earlier historical periods of cultural and economic exchange but on a much faster scale.
- Understanding these changes helps contextualize ongoing global issues like climate change and pandemics.
Summary
- Unit 9 of AP World History covers globalization and societal changes in the 20th century, focusing on science and technology.
- Science and technology eliminated geographic barriers through advancements in communication and transportation.
- Communication innovations include the radio, television, instant messaging (AIM), the internet, and smartphones like the iPhone.
- Transportation improvements involved efficient shipping containers, planes, and faster delivery systems like Amazon Prime.
- Medical advancements increased life expectancy and quality of life, including vaccinations, birth control, and treatments for diseases like HIV/AIDS.
- Many medical innovations arose in response to global health crises such as the Spanish flu, AIDS epidemic, and COVID-19 pandemic.
- The 20th century saw a shift from subsistence agriculture to more developed economies, influencing family size and societal structures.
- The video draws parallels between globalization in the 20th century and earlier periods of regional trade and cultural diffusion.
- The video series is divided into three parts: unification through science and technology, economic growth acceleration, and modern global challenges.
- The guiding question is how science and technology brought change from 1900 to the present, emphasizing global unification and advancement.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Because today I get to teach you about the 90s.
Speaker A
It was a time when I was alive.
Speaker A
Okay, we're not only covering the 90s today, but we are covering the beginning, the first part of Unit 9, and Unit 9 is like the previous two units in the AP World History curriculum.
Speaker A
In theory, it's the entire 20th century, but the theme of Unit 9 is globalization, which is really the buzzword for kind of the post-Cold War world, the 90s and the 2000s, and like, hey, y'all will be alive during some of this unit.
Speaker A
So, I'm going to break this down into three parts, focusing on different aspects of kind of the changing globalizing world, and the reason why I'm going a little bit more in-depth in Unit 9 than I have in the other unit intros is because your teachers might not make it here for the AP exam, and if they don't, that's totally fine, just watch these videos instead, that's what I'm having my own kids do.
Speaker A
And so the good news here is that this is the unit that you can go the quickest through, you don't have to necessarily have the level of depth that you've needed for other units, it's kind of similar to Unit 1 in that way.
Speaker A
And so also, I think it's the easiest unit because like I mentioned before, you've lived through some of this unit and you're still living through some of this unit, and so a lot of it is relatively intuitive, so what you really just need is you need to just see, you know, really the 90s through today and to kind of maybe the last 100 years more generally, through the lens of history as opposed to the lens of like just what you know, right?
Speaker A
So the guiding question for Unit 9 comes from the AP World History curriculum and they want you to be able to explain the extent to which science and technology brought change in the period from 1900 to the present.
Speaker A
We're going to answer this question in three parts, part one that we're going to focus on today is the fact that science and technology is going to unify the globe.
Speaker A
It unifies people and it facilitated social and economic advancement.
Speaker A
In a way that we've never seen before, so in a lot of ways Unit 9 is actually pretty similar to like the period of 1200 to 1450 where we're seeing massive regional trade networks like the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean connecting people having cultural diffusion, but it's just happening now almost instantaneously and all around the globe kind of happening at the same time.
Speaker A
I will just give you a little preview, the next topic that we're going to talk about in part two of this video series is going to be how technology and science is going to accelerate economic growth, and so the changing economy from, you know, the last 100 years, but more specifically the 90s to today.
Speaker A
And then the third part of this series is going to be about really the modern set of problems that we're facing, and that's going to be the video of you just going, yeah, we know Emily, we know about climate change.
Speaker A
So, uh, let's focus first on how science and technology is unifying people and it's allowing social and economic advancement in a way that we've never seen before.
Speaker A
So, really, there's a few topics here that I want to cover.
Speaker A
One is that new technology is eliminating geographic barriers, it's allowing for better and more efficient communication and transportation.
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And a lot of this is pretty obvious when we're talking about communication, you have the radio.
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Like the radio is invented, at least like the commercial radio that can be used in people's homes.
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Right around 1900, the beginning of this century.
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Obviously, we're eventually going to have TVs.
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I really want to talk to you for a second about a thing called instant messaging.
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Gen Z.
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Instant messaging or AIM from America Online Instant Messaging was it was like ahead of its time.
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If you were a 90s kid, you could just sit on your AIM instant messaging thing all weekend and hope that the person that you liked screen name would pop up that they were online too.
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And then there was this whole weird dance of like if you had to go away, what your away message would be and you wanted it to be really cute.
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The point is, this was at the time, the internet really exploding into people's homes.
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Where you could start to use like chat rooms before they were super creepy, maybe they were always creepy and I just didn't realize.
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And you could use instant messaging where you could sit there and like text through your computer instantaneously with your friends and whoever you wanted to.
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I know this seems really basic now, but it was very exciting in the 90s.
Speaker A
Okay.
Speaker A
Um, obviously now we have the iPhone, right?
Speaker A
The iPhone comes out from Apple in 2006, uh, which is probably later than you thought it was.
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And so all of this is creating these elimination of barriers of communication where you can now, um, first in the early 1900s.
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You just have like across the country or even across the world, you can have different people listening to the same thing, the same speech, whatever.
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By the 1950s, 60s, you have television uniting nations together and creating more unified culture and cultural experiences.
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And then the internet like really booming in the 1990s and beyond.
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Okay.
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It also eliminates barriers of transportation, so we start to have way more efficient, uh, shipping methods, huge shipping containers that can be carried on these massive ships.
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Uh, planes.
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Obviously, Amazon Prime, yada, yada, yada.
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You get it.
Speaker A
Okay.
Speaker A
The second thing is we have a lot of medical innovations that improved the length and quality of life, but the problem is that a lot of those medical innovations are created out of necessity.
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Because there are also a lot of global health crises in the 20th and now 21st centuries.
Speaker A
This is going to be a little bit too soon.
Speaker A
But we got to learn about it.
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So first is you have the rise of vaccinations like um polio and the smallpox vaccination.
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And measles and whatever.
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And so that's really rising in the 20th century as medicine gets more advanced.
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You have various forms of birth control kind of escalating into the pill in the 1960s.
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Which just gives women a lot more control over when or if they want to have children.
Speaker A
And really that's an interesting piece of evidence because it's also evidence of just improving quality of life anyway.
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Because one, if you're more confident that your children that you have will survive, you're not going to have as many.
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But also, as economies around the world and societies grow more developed and advanced, we're moving away from kind of subsistence agriculture.
Speaker A
Families don't really have an incentive to have more than, I don't know, one to three kids.
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Lastly, you also have um new advancements in medicine and technology like a lot of new treatments for HIV AIDS after the AIDS epidemic that started and is ongoing, but started in the 1980s.
Speaker A
Um, I mean, we're all living this right now, right?
Speaker A
We have the development of the COVID vaccine in like an insanely short amount of time.
Speaker A
But that built on earlier vaccines that had been developed through modern medicine.
Speaker A
The problem like I said is that a lot of these modern medical advancements come out of uh crises, they come out of global pandemics.
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So you had the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
Speaker A
I'm using air quotes because it did not start in Spain.
Speaker A
As far as we know, it actually started in Kansas either on a pig farm or a military base.
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But the point is that actually World War I spreads this Spanish flu, so um it was a really especially kind of strong variant of the flu.
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It starts, we believe in Kansas when the US troops enter World War I in 1917, they take it over with them.
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It then sort of lives in these gross dirty trenches and kind of mutates over that year.
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And then when the war ends and all the soldiers go home, they spread it all around the world.
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The reason why we call it the Spanish flu is because Spain was neutral in World War I and so they were not censoring their news.
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So the first reported cases that were like publicized were coming out of Spain because they were like, we don't, we don't care.
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We're not censoring what people know.
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Whereas in the US and Britain and France, they didn't want to create any other panics.
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While we were also trying to fight a war.
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So we called it the Spanish flu.
Speaker A
That's wrong.
Speaker A
Really the more correct form would just be like the flu pandemic of 1918.
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Okay.
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You also, like I mentioned before, have modern pandemics, uh, like the HIV AIDS pandemic.
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The modern COVID pandemic.
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Y'all get it.
Speaker A
Technology is also facilitating a global popular culture really for the first time.
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In this whole course, we've been talking about cultural diffusion a lot.
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We've been talking about the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road, the spread of Christianity.
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Um, the spread of Islam through trade and conquest, that sort of thing.
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But what we have really in the post-1950s world is really for the first time a global popular culture.
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And what that really looks like is a global Western culture and really American culture.
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This is something where the United States has created the most successful cultural empire that we've ever seen in world history.
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Some examples of that would be Hollywood, like the United States Hollywood being kind of the center of the film industry.
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Although that then spreads and diffuses and adapts and creates syncretic cultures like Bollywood in India and other film industries.
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That are sort of taking what they've learned from the American film and TV industry.
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And then adapting it to their own culture.
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Which is really cool, that like takes us all the way back to like Swahili, right, with Arabic and the Bantu languages mixing.
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That's all that's happening right now in something like Bollywood.
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You also have social media.
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I don't need to lecture you all about social media.
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That is helping create a global popular culture where like people from across the globe, especially young people, can all be like watching the same event, talking about the same event.
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Whatever.
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K-pop.
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I don't know, I, I could not name it.
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I don't know what band this is.
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I have no idea.
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I'm looking like I have a producer that can like tell me, it's just me.
Speaker A
But, uh, I don't know what band this is, but like K-pop's an example, right, of it's not just Western culture flowing outward.
Speaker A
Other civilizations are rising to where we're also getting like Korean culture into the West as well.
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You have mega sporting events that are really bringing together the world in a way that's very literal for a few weeks or a month at a time.
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That could be like the World Cup.
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That could be the Olympics, Olympic opening ceremonies, for example, are, I did like a whole dissertation on this.
Speaker A
In undergrad for history, but they're a whole like distillation of what is going on at the world at that moment.
Speaker A
And it's really fascinating.
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And so finally, you just have global culture with like food and clothing.
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The American jeans, which started out as like sturdy for American farmers, spread and become just sort of this like very general piece of clothing that most cultures have.
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You have McDonald's all around the world.
Speaker A
Sorry.
Speaker A
You had for a while a Starbucks in the Forbidden City in China, which just blows my mind.
Speaker A
And then the Chinese people were like, that seems like a little bit too far.
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So it closed down.
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So those are all examples.
Speaker A
The other thing is that technology and increased communication, this increasing connection and better communication and lowering of barriers is going to allow historically oppressed groups to unite and push for their own advancement more efficiently than ever before.
Speaker A
So you have uh my love, Eleanor Roosevelt, here she is, she's always next to me, hey Eleanor.
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Uh, she is going to get together with the new United Nations and these countries are going to literally be able to come together and sit in the same room.
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And she comes together with this UN Council to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Where we are literally attempting to create a global philosophy, like think about how we've talked about how Confucianism has united China, for example.
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The UN is attempting to do that globally and say we as an entire world culture on planet Earth are going to try to decide morally and ethically what we can and cannot do to other human beings.
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It has not worked perfectly, but I mean, we haven't given it that much time yet.
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We also have examples of other groups that had been previously dispersed like black people who had been forcibly spread around the globe as a result of slavery and the African diaspora.
Speaker A
They're not able to connect back together and have some shared experience as black people in white dominated cultures and governments.
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And so you have African-American leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, working with Jamaican leaders like Marcus Garvey, and with kind of African leaders, uh, Kwame Nkrumah, for example.
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And they're all starting to come together and they have these literal meetings, these conferences throughout the 1900s to discuss.
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What are the common issues facing black people all around the globe?
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In Latin America, you have a really interesting religious development that's happening within the Catholic Church.
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Which is called liberation theology.
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So essentially, this can go all the way back to the conquest, right, where Catholicism was forced onto a lot of the American cultures.
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But we've talked about from the beginning that Latin American Catholicism from the beginning has been distinct.
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It has always taken still some of the indigenous elements of their indigenous religions and kind of melted to create this new syncretic form of Catholicism.
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Well, that really reaches its peak in like the 1960s, 1970s when a lot of Latin American Catholic priests start applying Catholic teachings to social issues that are being experienced in Latin America.
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So the plight of peasants, the necessity of land redistribution.
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Fighting against military dominated governments that are not allowing freedom of expression, you start to see priests like Oscar Romero.
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Who are using their Catholic teachings to directly apply them to the plight of the poor and this quote unquote common people in Latin America.
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Finally, access to education and professional opportunities also expands to more social classes and minorities.
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And so you have something like the reservation quota system in India, which is an attempt to undo a lot of the damage of the millennia of the caste system.
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So Gandhi pushed to abolish the caste system formally in India.
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But of course, like we see in a lot of societies like the United States, we still see systemic racism and systemic issues continuing.
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And so India has implemented a thing called the reservation quota system that is sort of like affirmative action in the United States.
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For the lower castes to ensure that they are given equitable opportunity in education, in housing, in business, et cetera.
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You have the women's suffrage movement, right?
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First, it's really applying mostly to kind of white Western women, but then eventually we're trying to expand voting rights to all sectors of each population and around the globe.
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We're still working on that in some regions of the world.
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Um, and you have the dismantling of white supremacy around the world, at least formally.
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So you have movements like the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement, which leads to the rise of Nelson Mandela.
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Finally dismantling one of the last at least formal white supremacist governments in apartheid South Africa.
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This is where the American Civil Rights Movement would factor into the global, these global social movements for rights.
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Obviously, we still have a long way to go, but these formal systems of kind of this social Darwinist.
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Like rooted in the kind of 18th and 19th centuries white supremacist governments are being formally dismantled.
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Thanks to technology and increased communication being able to facilitate this change.
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So, that is how science and technology is bringing significant change.
Speaker A
It is unifying people, it's facilitating social and economic advancement.
Speaker A
Next episode, we're going to talk about the accelerated economic growth that we experience throughout the 1900s as a result of that improved science and technology.
Speaker A
All right, I hope this is helpful.
Speaker A
Follow me on all my channels, especially my TikTok.
Speaker A
I'm going to be starting especially after spring break posting a an AP World History video every day on TikTok from then until the AP exam.
Speaker A
So check me out there.
Speaker A
And if you really like the content I'm making, then check out my Patreon at patreon.com/antisocialstudies.
Speaker A
Enjoy the 90s.
Topics:AP World HistoryUnit 9globalization20th centuryscience and technologycommunicationtransportationmedical advancementsglobal health criseseconomic growth
