Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course: World History. We're back!

Stan, we painted over all the green parts of not-America with this globe. We need a new globe! Yes, new globe! Also, this one magically opens and stuff comes out of it.

So it turns out, surprisingly enough, there is more world history than we could fit into forty-two episodes. So for the next thirty episodes, we're gonna fill in some gaps that we missed before, but we're also gonna expand on some of the big ideas about history.

And we're gonna continue, not to sound meta, to try to think about how we think about history by approaching the study of history from different perspectives.

"Mr.Green! Mr.Green! Wait, I don't understand how all this stuff's gonna help me get a five on the AP Test."

Oh, me from the past, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: how well you do on the AP World History Test is not actually the event that's going to shape the course of your life. And you are not actually getting an education so that you could get good grades so that you can go to college so that you can get a job. We are investing as a social order in your education because it is useful to us to have you be an informed and engaged citizen of the world. I'm not interested in cramming the facts down your throat that will allow you to get a five on the AP Test. That's not what gets me excited in the morning. And I don't wanna be presumptuous but I think I can speak for your teachers when I say that's also not why they're doing their jobs.

Me from the past, the biggest problem with being alive is that you can only see the world out of your eyes, you can only live inside of your skin, your consciousness. You can't effectively imagine what it's like to be someone else.

But the study of history allows you to empathize better. It allows you to think more complexly about others. And that's gonna be useful to you not just on AP Tests but in every single moment of your entire life.

So I don't care that you've already taken the AP Test, because, and I say this with love, you are still kind of an idiot.

And so am I. So, we're gonna learn this stuff together, in the hopes that what we learn can somehow contribute in a small way to making our lives better, but also to making other lives better.

So we're gonna look at complicated and problematic ideas like civilization, we're gonna look at things like the history of money and economics, how environmental changes have affected the stability of social orders, and we're gonna talk about how war and disease and technology have not only shaped the world that people used to live in, but also the one that we're living in now.

And yes, due to extensive popular request, we will be talking about Vikings.

So it's gonna be a fun thirty weeks, full of Vikings and pirates and complex ideas and dirty jokes that can be read two ways so they can still be shown in class.

We're so excited to be back teaching world history. Thank you for watching, we'll see you next week.