World history
World history is the study and teaching of all or most of recorded history from the beginnings to the present. The World History Association publishes the quarterly Journal of World History.
Teaching
In college curricula, it became a popular replacement for courses on Western Civilization, beginning in the 1970s.
Theoretical and scholarly studies
Herodotus (5th century BC) was a world historian as well as founder of Greek historiography.[1] His History presents insightful and lively discussions of the customs, geography, and history of Mediterranean peoples, particularly the Egyptians. However, Thucydides promptly discarded Herodotus's all-embracing approach to history, offering instead a more precise, sharply focused monograph, dealing not with vast empires over the centuries but with 27 years of war between Athens and Sparta. In Rome, the vast, patriotic history of Rome by Livy (59 BC - 17 AD) approximated Herodotean inclusiveness[2]; Polybius aspired to combine the logical rigor of Thucydides with the scope of Herodotus.
In China Taoist writer Ssu-ma Cheng-chen (646-735 AD) presented a model of how to write and understand history that prevailed from his own time until 1911.
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in Italy pioneered the field with his Scienza nuova seconda (The New Science) in 1725. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) introduced the perspective of the Scottish Enlightenment in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).
Influential writers who have reached wide audiences including H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee[3], Pitirim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson[4], and Lewis Mumford. Scholars working the field include Eric Voegelin[5], William H. McNeill and Michael Mann.[6].
McNeill's well-known approach is broad, its organizing concept being the interactions of peoples across the globe. Such interactions have become both more numerous and more continual and substantial in recent times. Before about 1500, the network of communication between cultures was that of Eurasia. The term used to describe these areas of interaction differ from one world historian to another and include "world-system" and "ecumene." But whatever it is called, the importance of these intercultural contacts has begun to be recognized by many scholars.[7]
Academic historians tend to disparage scholarship in world history as virtually impossible.
Bibliography
- Bentley, Jerry H. Shapes of World History in Twentieth Century Scholarship. Essays on Global and Comparative History Series. (1996)
- Costello, Paul. World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism (1993).
- Frye, Northrop. "Spengler Revisited" in Northrop Frye on modern culture (2003), pp 297-382, first published 1974; online
- Hughes, H. Stuart. Oswald Spengler (1952).
- McInnes, Neil. "The Great Doomsayer: Oswald Spengler Reconsidered." National Interest 1997 (48): 65-76. Issn: 0884-9382 Fulltext: Ebsco
- McNeill, William H. "The Changing Shape of World History." History and Theory 1995 34(2): 8-26. Issn: 0018-2656 in JSTOR
- McNeill, William H., Jerry H. Bentley, and David Christian, eds. Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History (5 vol 2005)
- Mazlish, Bruce. "Comparing Global History to World History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Winter, 1998), pp. 385-395 in JSTOR
Primary sources
- Dawson, Christopher. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture(1991) excerpt and text search
- McNeill, Robert, and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (2003) excerpt and text search
- Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West (1918-22) vol 1 online; vol 2 online; excerpt and text search, abridged edition
notes
- ↑ K.H. Waters, Herodotus the Historian (1985)
- ↑ Patrick G. Walsh, Livy: His Historical Aims and Methods (1961)
- ↑ William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee a Life (1989)
- ↑ Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007)
- ↑ Michael P. Federici, Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order (2002)
- ↑ Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (1986) excerpt and text search
- ↑ William H. McNeill, "The Changing Shape of World History." History and Theory 1995 34(2): 8-26.