Here is the description of the AP World History course from the Advanced Placement Program Course Description: World History (commonly known as the "Acorn Book"), published by the College Board in January 2000:

"The purpose of the AP World History course is to develop greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts, in interaction with different types of human societies. This understanding is advanced through a combination of selective factual knowledge and appropriate analytical skills. The course highlights the nature of changes in international frameworks and their causes and consequences, as well as comparisons among major societies. The course emphasizes relevant factual knowledge deployed in conjunction with leading interpretive issues and types of historical evidence. Focused primarily on the past thousand years of the global experience, the course builds on an understanding of cultural, institutional, and technological precedents that, along with geography, set the human stage prior to 1000 C.E. Periodization, explicitly discussed, forms the organizing principle for dealing with change and continuity from that point to the present. Specific themes provide further organization to the course, along with the consistent attention to contacts among societies that form the core of world history as a field of study."