The Importance of History of The Roman Empire in Curriculum for AP World History Essay Example

Recently, when reviewing the curriculum for AP World History, I noticed that the section on the History of The Roman Empire was scrapped. In its place a new section on the modern-day implications of WW2 was fitted into the book. As a student of history, I find these changes distasteful. While the second world war was certainly an event that we must continue to teach and study, I believe that removing the unit on Rome will lower the merit of the course significantly. Rome’s history, legacy, and influence are vitally important for understanding how the world that we know today came to be, and it is important that we continue the study of this society both in an attempt to study the world before us and to see if we can continue to adapt the concepts and institutions that we have inherited to our ever-evolving world.

While some sacrifices have to be made in the pursuit of a better education for students, removing Rome in favor of an additional section on WW2 is cutting out two-thousand years of history so that we may focus on the impacts of a war that lasted six. Fixation on a particular event in history is something that is all too easy when the event in question is as recent as 80 years ago, but you mustn’t let it cloud your judgement. In general, removing any aspect of history is not something that should be done without incredibly careful and thorough consideration. The purpose of history is to record and pass on the stories and legacies of the world that we live in, and in cutting a section from a book also severs ties people have to those that came before them.

Rome in particular is also an incredibly rich object of study due to just how much information we have on them. The Romans were very keen on preserving their history, and because of this the amount of information we have on the empire’s history is incredibly well preserved. In these preserved writings we can look back and see with incredible clarity not only the legislature of the provinces and the marching of armies, but also the people who lived in and died for the Empire. Unlike many other societies that either lacked a strong emphasis on preserving history or whose history was preserved mostly orally, which means that many details inevitably would be lost over time, Rome’s recordkeeping was very robust. Even today almost 2300 years after the Punic wars, we know about the differing ideologies of Scipio and Cato , and of Cato’s vehement insistence that “[furthermore] Carthage must be destroyed ” which he famously ended every speech with. We know of the dealings between Caesar and Pompey and Crassus evolved into the first triumvirate. And we know all of these things because of the wealth of carefully preserved documentation that they left us.

Rome’s legacy also largely influenced the western world we know today, and its church, its language, its architecture, and so much more live on in some way even thirteen-hundred years after the city fell. In Roman Provinces, the Latin dialects divulged, birthing all of the Romance Languages, spoken by hundreds of millions of people across the world. Even in English, a Germanic language, we have no shortage of Latin derivatives, from forums to quorums to quests  to press, the language of the Romans has invaded every facet of western society. This is especially true for high academia, where Latin is directly used in almost every discipline. Biologists organize species by genus, Lawyers defend their clients from ad hominem, Astronomists use names such as Europa and Andromeda and Polaris for celestial bodies. Through the Romans, Greek Architecture was developed further and spread across the world, inspiring everything from the White House to the Reichstag to the Arc de Triomphe just to name a few. Roman Catholicism is the most followed religion the world over, and Christian majority nations make up just about all of the Americas and a larger portion of Europe.

And yet, the influence Rome has on our modern society is a just a fraction of what it once was. Following the Empire’s fall, countless leaders and countries tried to emulate them, from the Sultanate of Rum to the Holy Roman Empire, to the Czars and Kaisers (Literally “Caesar”) of Central and Eastern Europe, to the Risorgiemento in Italy during World War 2 attempting to restore Italy’s prestige to that which it had in antiquity(Encyclopedia Britannica). Not to mention the direct impacts that Rome’s Existence had on later history. While the city of Rome fell in 476, with the Western Empire completely falling shortly after, The East managed to live on. The Eastern Empire, hereby referred to as the Byzantines managed to hold together for almost a thousand more years, and its demise at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453 is what led to the glut in trade that led the Western Europeans to search for new trade routes to the east. The Romans had an impact on the later stages of history that just can’t be made up for and that is, for the most part, unique to the Romans. they are the classical-era society that is most vital to keep in curriculum because of the context that is lost when they are removed.

Like many others, I was drawn into history by stories of the Romans, of the man named Caesar who conquered far off lands, and of Augustus who was the first to hold in the palm of his hand absolute control of the Mediterranean. But sentiment aside, the preservation of these stories and the people who created them is vital. World War II’s Echoes still reverberate through our modern world and its peoples, but if we open our ears only to that, we may become deaf to another tone, smaller and faint, but whose ringing has remained as nations and men and generations have risen and fallen. The ringing sounds of the bells in the Basilica of Saint Peter, and the grander song of a place called Rome. 

Sources Cited

McKay, John P., Clare Haru Crowston, Merry E. Wiesner, and Joe Perry. “Chapter 5 ‘The Rise of Rome.’” Essay. In A History of Western Society, 118–31. Bedford/St Martin's, 2020. 

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Risorgimento." Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Risorgimento.