Memly's AP® World History Key Terms: 300 Study Cards

300 terms, each tied to a period and to why it mattered.

카드 300장

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앞면	뒷면
Causation in historical analysis	Definition: Identifying what brought an event about and what followed from it, distinguishing longer-term conditions from immediate triggers. Why it matters: A trigger explains the timing and a condition explains the possibility, so an account naming only one is incomplete.
Primary and secondary sources	Definition: A primary source comes from the period under study. A secondary source is a later account drawing on primary material. Watch out: The category depends on the question asked, since a later account becomes a primary source when studying the period that produced it.
State	Definition: A political organization exercising authority over a defined territory and population. Why it matters: The form varies enormously across the periods studied, so the term describes a function rather than a single structure.
Silk Roads	Definition: Overland routes linking East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. Period: Active long before 1200 and revived under Mongol rule. Significance: Carried high-value goods, but also beliefs, technologies and disease, so its cultural traffic outweighed its tonnage.
Flying cash and paper money	Definition: Credit instruments and later printed currency developed in China. Significance: Paper money reduced the weight of large transactions, and its value depended on confidence in the issuing state.
Mongol Empire	Definition: The largest contiguous land empire, assembled across Eurasia in the thirteenth century. Significance: It reopened overland routes under a single authority, which increased exchange across Eurasia even as conquest was destructive. Compare with: Maritime empires later, which controlled routes and ports rather than continuous territory.
Mali Empire	Definition: A West African state controlling gold-producing regions and trans-Saharan routes. Significance: Its rulers' patronage of Islamic learning made Timbuktu a scholarly centre, so wealth from trade was converted into cultural authority.
Role of religion in state authority	Definition: The use of religious sanction to justify and sustain rule across many societies in this period. Why it matters: Because religious and political authority were entangled, religious change often had direct political consequences.
Guilds	Definition: Associations of craftsmen or merchants regulating training, quality and entry to a trade. Why it matters: They limited competition and supplied training and mutual support, so their effect depended on which function is examined.
Maritime empire	Definition: An empire built on control of sea routes, ports and coastal enclaves rather than on continuous territory. Compare with: A land-based empire governing contiguous ground, which needed larger armies and different administration.
Plantation system	Definition: Large-scale monoculture production for export using coerced labour, concentrated in the Americas and the Atlantic islands. Significance: Its output was destined for distant markets rather than local consumption, which tied production directly to Atlantic commerce.
Global silver flow	Definition: The movement of American and Japanese silver to Asia, particularly China, in exchange for goods. Significance: Chinese demand, arising from tax and currency policy, drew silver across the world, so Asian demand shaped Atlantic mining.
Gunpowder empires	Definition: A grouping of large land-based states whose expansion relied heavily on firearms and artillery. Why it matters: The label highlights a shared military basis, and the states differed considerably in administration and religion.
Treasure voyages	Definition: Large state-sponsored Ming fleets that reached Southeast Asia, South Asia, Arabia and East Africa. Why it matters: Their scale exceeded contemporary European voyaging, and they ended by decision rather than by failure.
Protestant Reformation	Definition: A movement challenging doctrines and authority of the Roman Church, producing lasting divisions in western Christianity. Significance: Printing spread its arguments rapidly, and rulers' choices in adopting or resisting it reorganized European politics.
Social contract	Definition: The idea that political authority rests on an agreement among the governed rather than on divine appointment or conquest. Why it matters: If authority rests on agreement, it can be withdrawn, which is the reasoning later revolutions used.
Atlantic revolutions	Definition: A connected series of political upheavals in North America, France, Haiti and Spanish America. Why it matters: They shared a vocabulary of rights and sovereignty, so they are studied as one movement of ideas rather than as separate national events.
End of serfdom in Russia	Definition: The legal emancipation of serfs, with land settlements that left many indebted. Why it matters: Legal freedom without economic independence is a recurring pattern in emancipations of this period.
Industrial Revolution	Definition: The shift to machine production, factory organization and mineral energy sources. Significance: It changed where people lived and how work was organized as much as what was produced.
Telegraph	Definition: Electrical transmission of messages over wire. Significance: It separated the speed of information from the speed of travel for the first time, which changed markets, empires and warfare together.
New imperialism	Definition: The rapid extension of European, and later American and Japanese, control over Africa and Asia in the later nineteenth century. Significance: Its pace was enabled by industrial technology, and its motives combined raw materials, markets, strategy and prestige.
Unequal treaties	Definition: Agreements imposing terms including fixed tariffs, opened ports and exemption of foreigners from local law. Why it matters: They limited sovereignty without formal annexation, so a state could remain nominally independent while losing control of key powers.
Suez Canal	Definition: A waterway linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Significance: It shortened routes between Europe and Asia dramatically, which increased both trade and the strategic value of the surrounding region.
Total war	Definition: Warfare in which states mobilize whole economies and populations and treat civilian production as a legitimate target. Why it matters: It erases the distinction between front and home front, which is what makes the twentieth century's wars different in kind from earlier ones.
Mandate system	Definition: An arrangement placing former territories of defeated empires under the administration of victorious powers. Why it matters: It was presented as temporary trusteeship and functioned in most respects as colonial rule.
Bipolar international order	Definition: An international system dominated by two states with opposed political and economic systems. Why it matters: Local conflicts were interpreted through that rivalry, which drew outside intervention into disputes with local origins.
Command economy	Definition: An economy in which the state sets production targets, prices and allocation rather than markets. Compare with: A market economy coordinated by prices. The contrast in how resources are directed is the substantive difference.
Decolonization	Definition: The dismantling of colonial empires and the emergence of independent states, concentrated in the decades after 1945. Significance: Weakened imperial powers, wartime commitments to self-determination and sustained anti-colonial organization combined to make it possible.
United Nations	Definition: An international organization founded after 1945 for collective security and cooperation. Why it matters: Its structure gives permanent members of the security council a veto, which shapes what collective action is possible.
Regional economic integration	Definition: Agreements reducing barriers and coordinating policy among neighbouring states. Why it matters: Deeper integration requires ceding some national decision-making, which is the trade-off every such arrangement negotiates.

이 덱 소개

A term you can define and cannot place is worth very little in this course. The questions ask what caused something, what it can be compared with, and what changed and what did not, so a card that stops at the definition leaves the actual work undone. Knowing that the Columbian Exchange moved organisms between hemispheres is the easy half. The half that answers a question is that the resulting demographic collapse created the labour shortage that the Atlantic slave trade was expanded to fill. So these 300 cards carry the definition and then the consequence. All 300 open with a definition and 272 give the significance or the reason it mattered, with 19 naming an explicit comparison where two terms are routinely confused. The deck is divided evenly, 70 cards in each of the four periods from 1200 to the present, plus 20 on historical thinking itself: causation, continuity and change, contextualization, periodization, and how to read a source for point of view and purpose. Contentious events are here as events. What happened, through what mechanism, and with what consequence, kept separate from how anyone should judge it now. That is also what the course asks for, since it rewards causation and comparison rather than verdicts. Cards are tagged by period and by theme, so you can drill just the trade networks, just the land-based empires, or just decolonization.

자주 묻는 질문

What is on each card?: A term on the front. On the back, a definition on all 300, and on 272 the significance or the reason it mattered, which is the part a causation or comparison question actually turns on. 19 cards name a term this one is routinely confused with and say what separates them. Each line is labeled, so the back reads as a short structured answer.
How is the deck divided by period?: Evenly, at 70 cards each: 1200 to 1450, 1450 to 1750, 1750 to 1900, and 1900 to the present. A further 20 cards cover historical thinking itself. The even split is deliberate, since the later periods are easier to over-weight and the earlier ones carry the trade networks that everything after depends on.
How does it handle contentious history?: As events with mechanisms and consequences, separated from present-day judgement. Colonial rule, the slave trade, the Holocaust and the Cold War are all here, described through how they operated and what followed. The deck does not take positions on live political disputes, and it does not generalize about any people or faith.
Why are there 20 cards on historical thinking?: Because those terms transfer to every other card. Causation, continuity and change, comparison, contextualization, and reading a source for point of view and purpose are what the questions are built on, so they repay study more per card than any single period does.
How does it fit with a timeline deck?: They ask opposite questions. A timeline deck puts a date on the front and asks what happened. This one puts a term on the front and asks for its period, region and significance. Knowing 1492 and knowing what the Columbian Exchange was are different pieces of knowledge, and either can be missing while the other is secure.
Can I import the whole deck on the free plan?: Yes. Importing a saved deck runs no new AI generation and spends no AI credits, so the free plan imports every card. You can study, edit and delete them afterwards.
Will importing it twice create duplicates?: No. Cards you already have are skipped and only cards added in a revision come through. Including re-imports after deleting it, one official deck can be imported three times per account.
Can I edit the cards after importing?: Yes. Once imported they are your cards: edit either side, delete the ones you already know cold, retag them, or move them into another deck.

AP® and Advanced Placement® are trademarks registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this deck. No official questions or course framework text are reproduced, and every card is written by Memly. Compiled 2026-08-22.