The 113 competencies set for Grade 7 World Studies, and every one has lessons behind it.
Geography, Resources, Routes, and Power
20 competencies
Explain plantation production as large-scale agriculture oriented toward commercial export and dependent on controlled labor.
Explain how conquest transferred land, labor, minerals, and agricultural goods toward colonial and imperial centers.
Explain how geographic location influenced early-modern trade, conquest, settlement, defense, and political power.
Identify ports, straits, river mouths, islands, capes, mountain passes, mines, plantation zones, and commercial cities as strategic locations.
Explain how prevailing winds, currents, seasonal weather, and coastlines affected oceanic navigation.
Compare overland, river, coastal, and open-ocean transport by capacity, speed, cost, risk, and geographic requirements.
Explain how access to silver, gold, timber, fertile land, fisheries, spices, textiles, horses, and other resources could strengthen states or commercial groups.
Explain how political control of ports, straits, passes, mines, or productive regions changed access to resources and trade.
Compare the geography of the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Pacific, and Eurasian overland systems.
Explain why maritime empires often controlled coastal bases and routes more effectively than large inland territories.
Explain why tropical and subtropical environments became important locations for plantation agriculture.
Explain how mining centers depended on water, food, timber, labor, transport, and political control.
Use physical, resource, route, political, and settlement maps together to answer an early-modern historical question.
Construct a geographic power profile linking location, resources, routes, technology, labor, and government.
Evaluate a claim that geography made an early-modern development inevitable.
Explain how conquest, disease, forced migration, ecological transfer, and commercial change altered population and settlement patterns.
Explain how early-modern global connections expanded the frequency, scale, and distance of exchange.
Explain how American silver connected Atlantic, European, African, and Asian markets.
Explain how global connections created unequal benefits, forced migration, ecological disruption, and vulnerability to disease or market change.
Explain a contact zone as a place where people from different societies interact under cooperative, competitive, or unequal conditions.
Power, Authority, Religion, and Early-Modern Sources
26 competencies
Define power as the capacity to influence decisions, institutions, resources, or behavior.
Define authority as power recognized through law, custom, religion, office, military control, wealth, or an accepted political process.
Explain legitimacy as the claimed or accepted basis on which a ruler or institution exercises authority.
Identify hereditary, religious, military, bureaucratic, legal, commercial, and representative sources of early-modern authority.
Explain centralization as the concentration of decision-making, taxation, military control, or administration within a central government.
Explain that centralization may remain incomplete because of local elites, geography, custom, religious institutions, communication limits, or resistance.
Explain how rulers used law, religion, dynastic lineage, conquest, public works, court ritual, art, and patronage to claim legitimacy.
Explain how empires governed culturally and religiously diverse populations through provincial officials, local rulers, military forces, courts, taxation, tribute, and negotiated privilege.
Describe the relationship between religious authority and political authority in selected early-modern states.
Explain legal pluralism as the coexistence of imperial, religious, local, customary, and community-specific legal systems.
Explain how chartered companies could exercise both commercial and political authority.
Compare official structures with practical power held by court factions, military forces, religious institutions, merchants, landholders, or local communities.
Compare early-modern governments and empires without ranking one as universally superior.
Evaluate a source’s reliability for a specific historical question.
Explain that reliability depends on creator, date, access to information, genre, purpose, audience, transmission, translation, and the claim being tested.
Define bias as a patterned inclination, interest, assumption, or framing that shapes a source.
Distinguish bias from simple factual error or deliberate falsehood.
Identify propaganda and explain how it seeks to shape an audience.
Identify multiple perspectives on one event or process.
Explain that people within the same community may hold different perspectives.
Distinguish independent corroboration from sources repeating the same account.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain how religion influenced early-modern government, law, art, education, family life, social status, warfare, and political legitimacy.
Compare official religious policy with local religious practice.
Compare religious change without ranking the truth or value of belief systems.
Distinguish historical study of religion from devotional participation.
Renaissance, Printing, and New Knowledge
17 competencies
Compare official structures with practical power held by court factions, military forces, religious institutions, merchants, landholders, or local communities.
Explain early global commerce as expanding exchange linking producers, laborers, merchants, states, companies, transporters, and consumers across several continents.
Explain how geographic location influenced early-modern trade, conquest, settlement, defense, and political power.
Trace the movement of crops, animals, metals, manufactured goods, technologies, religious ideas, languages, and artistic forms across oceans and continents.
Explain how language spread through trade, administration, religion, schooling, migration, and coercion.
Evaluate a source’s reliability for a specific historical question.
Explain that reliability depends on creator, date, access to information, genre, purpose, audience, transmission, translation, and the claim being tested.
Identify propaganda and explain how it seeks to shape an audience.
Analyze how official chronicles, conquest narratives, missionary accounts, merchant reports, and legal records serve particular purposes.
Compare sources produced by rulers, officials, religious figures, merchants, Indigenous authors, captives, colonists, enslaved people, travelers, and later historians.
Evaluate maps, paintings, engravings, monuments, coins, religious art, and other visual sources as constructed representations.
Explain how translation, transcription, editing, and later publication may alter access to an original source.
Corroborate a claim using independent written, oral, visual, archaeological, environmental, or quantitative evidence.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain why silence in a source does not prove that an event, person, or practice did not exist.
Describe Renaissance Christian patronage and religious art within its historical context.
Analyze religious sources, art, architecture, laws, sermons, missionary reports, and ritual objects with attention to perspective and purpose.
Reformation, Catholic Reform, and Religious Conflict
19 competencies
Explain centralization as the concentration of decision-making, taxation, military control, or administration within a central government.
Describe the relationship between religious authority and political authority in selected early-modern states.
Explain how conquest changed legal status, property rights, labor duties, political participation, and religious authority.
Define bias as a patterned inclination, interest, assumption, or framing that shapes a source.
Analyze how official chronicles, conquest narratives, missionary accounts, merchant reports, and legal records serve particular purposes.
Compare sources produced by rulers, officials, religious figures, merchants, Indigenous authors, captives, colonists, enslaved people, travelers, and later historians.
Identify multiple perspectives on one event or process.
Explain that people within the same community may hold different perspectives.
Identify voices missing because of destruction, illiteracy, power inequality, archival selection, language loss, or deliberate suppression.
Explain how translation, transcription, editing, and later publication may alter access to an original source.
Corroborate a claim using independent written, oral, visual, archaeological, environmental, or quantitative evidence.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain major causes of the Protestant Reformation, including theology, Church institutions, politics, printing, education, and local grievances.
Describe major Lutheran teachings at an introductory level.
Describe major Reformed or Calvinist teachings at an introductory level.
Explain the political and religious development of the English Reformation.
Describe Radical Reformation groups at an introductory level while recognizing their diversity.
Explain Catholic reform through the Council of Trent, Jesuits, seminaries, religious orders, art, education, and institutional discipline.
Explain why religious conflicts also involved dynastic, political, economic, and territorial causes.
Oceanic Expansion, Navigation, and Maritime Empires
26 competencies
Explain how chartered companies could exercise both commercial and political authority.
Explain economic motives for oceanic expansion, including access to spices, metals, textiles, markets, tax revenue, and trade routes.
Explain how states financed or authorized voyages through royal support, private investment, contracts, monopolies, and commercial partnerships.
Describe chartered companies and joint-stock organization at an introductory historical level.
Explain how commercial monopolies granted exclusive trading rights to selected merchants or companies.
Explain why maritime empires often controlled coastal bases and routes more effectively than large inland territories.
Explain how conquest, disease, forced migration, ecological transfer, and commercial change altered population and settlement patterns.
Explain how early-modern global connections expanded the frequency, scale, and distance of exchange.
Explain how the Indian Ocean remained an active commercial system while European powers entered and attempted to control parts of it.
Explain how chartered companies combined commerce, diplomacy, military power, and political rule.
Explain how global connections created unequal benefits, forced migration, ecological disruption, and vulnerability to disease or market change.
Explain cultural change through contact, trade, migration, conquest, colonization, missionary activity, and political rule.
Identify interpreters, cultural brokers, merchants, missionaries, diplomats, migrants, captives, and mixed-heritage communities as agents of exchange.
Explain a contact zone as a place where people from different societies interact under cooperative, competitive, or unequal conditions.
Describe port cities, colonial cities, frontier settlements, mission communities, trading enclaves, and imperial courts as contact zones.
Explain that cultural blending may occur within systems of violence, enslavement, conquest, or inequality.
Compare different cultural responses to the same empire, trade network, or religious mission.
Reject the idea that cultures were pure or isolated before early-modern contact.
Construct a culture-contact account using sources from more than one community.
Analyze how official chronicles, conquest narratives, missionary accounts, merchant reports, and legal records serve particular purposes.
Compare sources produced by rulers, officials, religious figures, merchants, Indigenous authors, captives, colonists, enslaved people, travelers, and later historians.
Identify multiple perspectives on one event or process.
Explain that people within the same community may hold different perspectives.
Identify voices missing because of destruction, illiteracy, power inequality, archival selection, language loss, or deliberate suppression.
Corroborate a claim using independent written, oral, visual, archaeological, environmental, or quantitative evidence.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires
20 competencies
Explain centralization as the concentration of decision-making, taxation, military control, or administration within a central government.
Explain that centralization may remain incomplete because of local elites, geography, custom, religious institutions, communication limits, or resistance.
Compare the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Ming, Qing, and selected European systems of imperial or monarchical rule.
Explain how rulers used law, religion, dynastic lineage, conquest, public works, court ritual, art, and patronage to claim legitimacy.
Explain how empires governed culturally and religiously diverse populations through provincial officials, local rulers, military forces, courts, taxation, tribute, and negotiated privilege.
Describe the relationship between religious authority and political authority in selected early-modern states.
Explain legal pluralism as the coexistence of imperial, religious, local, customary, and community-specific legal systems.
Define cultural blending or syncretism as the creation or development of practices combining elements from more than one tradition.
Distinguish voluntary adoption, selective adaptation, pressured assimilation, and forced cultural change.
Explain that cultural blending may occur within systems of violence, enslavement, conquest, or inequality.
Compare sources produced by rulers, officials, religious figures, merchants, Indigenous authors, captives, colonists, enslaved people, travelers, and later historians.
Identify multiple perspectives on one event or process.
Identify voices missing because of destruction, illiteracy, power inequality, archival selection, language loss, or deliberate suppression.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain why religious conflicts also involved dynastic, political, economic, and territorial causes.
Describe Ottoman Sunni institutions and religious diversity.
Describe Safavid adoption of Twelver Shia Islam and its role in state identity.
Describe Mughal religious policy and interaction among Islam, Hindu traditions, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity, and other communities.
Explain the early development of Sikhism through teachings associated with Guru Nanak and later Gurus.
Compare official religious policy with local religious practice.
Ming and Early Qing China in an Expanding World
22 competencies
Explain centralization as the concentration of decision-making, taxation, military control, or administration within a central government.
Explain that centralization may remain incomplete because of local elites, geography, custom, religious institutions, communication limits, or resistance.
Compare the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Ming, Qing, and selected European systems of imperial or monarchical rule.
Explain how empires governed culturally and religiously diverse populations through provincial officials, local rulers, military forces, courts, taxation, tribute, and negotiated privilege.
Compare official structures with practical power held by court factions, military forces, religious institutions, merchants, landholders, or local communities.
Explain early global commerce as expanding exchange linking producers, laborers, merchants, states, companies, transporters, and consumers across several continents.
Trace global silver flows from American mines through Europe, the Atlantic, and Pacific trade into Asian markets.
Explain how large silver inflows affected prices, taxation, state finance, and exchange at an introductory level.
Compare the geography of the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Pacific, and Eurasian overland systems.
Explain how American silver connected Atlantic, European, African, and Asian markets.
Explain how the Indian Ocean remained an active commercial system while European powers entered and attempted to control parts of it.
Distinguish voluntary adoption, selective adaptation, pressured assimilation, and forced cultural change.
Identify interpreters, cultural brokers, merchants, missionaries, diplomats, migrants, captives, and mixed-heritage communities as agents of exchange.
Compare different cultural responses to the same empire, trade network, or religious mission.
Identify internal diversity within Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Ming, Qing, European, African, and American societies.
Evaluate a source’s reliability for a specific historical question.
Analyze how official chronicles, conquest narratives, missionary accounts, merchant reports, and legal records serve particular purposes.
Identify multiple perspectives on one event or process.
Explain that people within the same community may hold different perspectives.
Corroborate a claim using independent written, oral, visual, archaeological, environmental, or quantitative evidence.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain missionary activity in the Americas, Africa, and Asia through preaching, schooling, translation, political support, coercion, negotiation, and local adoption.
Conquest and Colonial Rule in the Americas
21 competencies
Describe colonial government through governors, councils, courts, municipal institutions, tribute systems, missions, and local intermediaries.
Explain how conquest changed legal status, property rights, labor duties, political participation, and religious authority.
Explain how conquest transferred land, labor, minerals, and agricultural goods toward colonial and imperial centers.
Explain how geographic location influenced early-modern trade, conquest, settlement, defense, and political power.
Explain how epidemic diseases altered populations, political power, labor systems, settlement, and conquest.
Identify interpreters, cultural brokers, merchants, missionaries, diplomats, migrants, captives, and mixed-heritage communities as agents of exchange.
Explain how Indigenous communities preserved, adapted, concealed, or transformed cultural practices under colonial rule.
Explain that cultural blending may occur within systems of violence, enslavement, conquest, or inequality.
Evaluate a source’s reliability for a specific historical question.
Explain that reliability depends on creator, date, access to information, genre, purpose, audience, transmission, translation, and the claim being tested.
Analyze how official chronicles, conquest narratives, missionary accounts, merchant reports, and legal records serve particular purposes.
Compare sources produced by rulers, officials, religious figures, merchants, Indigenous authors, captives, colonists, enslaved people, travelers, and later historians.
Identify multiple perspectives on one event or process.
Explain that people within the same community may hold different perspectives.
Identify voices missing because of destruction, illiteracy, power inequality, archival selection, language loss, or deliberate suppression.
Evaluate quantitative records such as ship logs, tax lists, tribute records, prices, population estimates, and cargo manifests.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain why silence in a source does not prove that an event, person, or practice did not exist.
Explain missionary activity in the Americas, Africa, and Asia through preaching, schooling, translation, political support, coercion, negotiation, and local adoption.
Explain how Indigenous and African religious traditions survived, adapted, or blended under colonial and enslaved conditions.
The Columbian Exchange and Early Global Commerce
21 competencies
Explain early global commerce as expanding exchange linking producers, laborers, merchants, states, companies, transporters, and consumers across several continents.
Describe chartered companies and joint-stock organization at an introductory historical level.
Explain how customs duties, port fees, convoy protection, insurance, credit, bills of exchange, and written contracts supported commerce.
Trace global silver flows from American mines through Europe, the Atlantic, and Pacific trade into Asian markets.
Explain how large silver inflows affected prices, taxation, state finance, and exchange at an introductory level.
Compare economic benefits, burdens, risks, and coercion experienced by different participants in early global commerce.
Explain how warfare, piracy, privateering, disease, rebellion, state regulation, and route disruption affected early-modern commerce.
Explain how conquest, disease, forced migration, ecological transfer, and commercial change altered population and settlement patterns.
Explain the Columbian Exchange as the transfer of organisms, people, and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492.
Explain how epidemic diseases altered populations, political power, labor systems, settlement, and conquest.
Explain how American crops affected food systems and population patterns in Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Explain how Afro-Eurasian animals and crops transformed environments and economies in the Americas.
Explain how American silver connected Atlantic, European, African, and Asian markets.
Explain how global connections created unequal benefits, forced migration, ecological disruption, and vulnerability to disease or market change.
Compare local experiences within the same global system.
Create a global system model containing nodes, routes, goods, people, finance, political authority, disease, ecological transfer, and resistance.
Evaluate a claim that early globalization produced uniform cultural or economic change.
Evaluate quantitative records such as ship logs, tax lists, tribute records, prices, population estimates, and cargo manifests.
Corroborate a claim using independent written, oral, visual, archaeological, environmental, or quantitative evidence.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Early Global World
22 competencies
Explain the transatlantic slave trade as a commercial and coercive system linking African, European, and American regions.
Describe the roles of African rulers, merchants, brokers, raiders, captives, European traders, shipowners, plantation owners, colonial officials, and consumers without assigning one uniform role to an entire continent or people.
Explain the economic organization and human consequences of the Middle Passage.
Compare economic benefits, burdens, risks, and coercion experienced by different participants in early global commerce.
Construct an early-global-commerce network showing production, labor, transport, finance, taxation, sale, and consumption.
Distinguish early commercial expansion from the later industrial economic system studied in Grade 8.
Explain how the Atlantic system connected warfare, enslavement, shipping, plantation production, mining, taxation, and consumption.
Compare local experiences within the same global system.
Create a global system model containing nodes, routes, goods, people, finance, political authority, disease, ecological transfer, and resistance.
Evaluate a claim that early globalization produced uniform cultural or economic change.
Explain how African cultural practices continued and changed in the Americas.
Explain that cultural blending may occur within systems of violence, enslavement, conquest, or inequality.
Identify internal diversity within Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Ming, Qing, European, African, and American societies.
Define bias as a patterned inclination, interest, assumption, or framing that shapes a source.
Compare sources produced by rulers, officials, religious figures, merchants, Indigenous authors, captives, colonists, enslaved people, travelers, and later historians.
Explain that people within the same community may hold different perspectives.
Identify voices missing because of destruction, illiteracy, power inequality, archival selection, language loss, or deliberate suppression.
Evaluate quantitative records such as ship logs, tax lists, tribute records, prices, population estimates, and cargo manifests.
Construct a multiperspectival historical account containing claim, evidence, perspective analysis, reliability limits, and uncertainty.
Explain why silence in a source does not prove that an event, person, or practice did not exist.
Identify where stronger weighing of conflicting evidence and significance analysis will be required in Grade 8.
Explain how Indigenous and African religious traditions survived, adapted, or blended under colonial and enslaved conditions.
