---
name: "world_history_survey"
description: "Writes a world history survey organized around big patterns and turning points instead of great-man-only narratives. Triggers when someone asks for a world history overview, summary, explainer, or study guide spanning civilizations and eras."
metadata: { "includeInPrompt": true }
---

# World History Survey

## Purpose
Produce a world history survey that readers can actually learn from: big patterns across civilizations, the turning points that matter, and the systems behind events, without falling back on a parade of named leaders. Built for explainers, study guides, course overviews, and briefing documents.

## Workflow

1. **Fix the scope.** Get the time span and the regions before writing. A survey of 1200 CE to now looks very different from one of 8000 BCE to now. If the request is vague, pick a span, say so up front, and move on.

2. **Choose the patterns lens.** Frame the survey around six cross-cutting themes, adapted from the College Board's AP World History framework: people and the environment; culture and ideas; states and power; economic systems; social structures; technology and innovation. Most readers do not need all six spelled out, but every section should show at least one pattern at work, or it is just trivia.

3. **Anchor each period on one turning point.** A turning point counts when change runs across several themes at once. Your short list of defaults, each verified in `references/turning-points.md`:
   - Agricultural Revolution, c. 8000 BCE: food surplus, cities, writing, hierarchy.
   - Classical empires and codified traditions, 600 BCE to 600 CE.
   - Intensified global trade networks, 600 to 1450: Silk Roads, Indian Ocean, Trans-Saharan routes.
   - The Columbian Exchange, after 1492: new crops, mass disease, the Atlantic slave trade.
   - The Industrial Revolution, from c. 1750: fossil fuel energy, factories, urbanization.
   - Decolonization and globalization, after 1945.
   Add or drop turning points to fit the scope, but justify each one in one sentence.

4. **De-center the great men.** Leaders may appear, but never alone. For every named figure, add the forces around them: labor systems, disease, trade routes, weather, ordinary people who built, resisted, or paid the cost. If a figure's story cannot be told that way, the figure does not belong in the survey.

5. **For each period, state continuity AND change.** "What stayed the same while this shifted?" is the question that makes a survey worth reading. If a section only lists new things, rewrite it.

6. **Close with the present.** Tie one pattern from the past to something happening now, stated as opinion or clearly-sourced fact, never as a prophecy.

## Output Contract
- One page per era maximum unless asked for more.
- Every section ends with a "pattern line": one sentence naming the big pattern it shows.
- A closing table mapping each turning point to the themes it touched and one sentence on why it matters.
- No invented numbers, dates, quotes, or events. Every factual claim is verified against a source; anything unverifiable gets cut or labeled as opinion. If a date is approximate, say so (c. 1450, not 1450).

## Operating Rules
1. Accuracy rule: every factual claim must be verified via web search or a primary source. Never invent numbers, dates, quotes, or events. Unverifiable = cut it or frame as opinion. No confident unverified claims, ever.
2. Systems before individuals. If more than half the names in a section are leaders or conquerors, rebalance before shipping.
3. Plain talk. No em dashes, no "moreover", no "in today's fast-paced world", no inspirational filler. Write like a person explaining this over coffee.
4. When unsure of a fact, look it up. When you cannot verify it, leave it out and say so.