TREVOR GETZ
My experience at World History Association conferences has been that there is a deep divide between research and teaching in world history, despite the efforts of many to connect the two. Most of the instructors who do the grunt work of teaching world history, for example, eschew the kind of theoretical and epistemological discussions put forward by historians like Alun Munslow and Keith Jenkins. Yet their work has deep relevance for the kinds of discussions we should be having as world historians. Munslow and Jenkins have clearly identified three genres of historical scholarship: reconstruction, construction, and deconstruction (Munslow 2006; Jenkins and Munslow 2004). As teachers, we reconstruct the past for our students, and try to teach them the “best practices” of reconstruction as well. But we also construct stories and themes for our students, and aim to teach them to critically deconstruct the global histories presented to them out in the world, in books, in theater, in museums, and elsewhere in popular culture.
What we are perhaps least likely to do successfully, however, is to teach students to deconstruct their classroom learning, an act that would undermine our own authority and that of the material we are passing on to them. (See Bain, this volume.) Yet that is exactly what I mean to do in this chapter. Specifically, I am going to delve back into my own past as an instructor to explore how I have taught world history over the past decade. My objective is to explore the content, structures, and approaches of my courses over time, and to interpret the changes and continuities I find. The analysis of a course as something that changes over time might be surprising to students, who tend to understand a “course” as a static structure. In their brief encounter with it, a course seems complete and unchanging. Only the instructor, who encounters this course again and again, will have insight into it as a process rather than an event. Of course, the instructor is not an unbiased observer. Yet this does not mean that there is no value in a reflexive survey of one’s own courses and how they have changed over time. This is a point that I will try to prove in the conclusion to this chapter – but to begin my story at the beginning …
Snapshot 1: World History Survey, University of New Orleans, 2000
In late August 2000, I gave my second lecture as a newly minted assistant professor in New Orleans. The pre-Katrina history department at the university was a pleasant place to teach. Courses were largely assigned to faculty by the department chair, but it was a benevolent dictatorship with the needs of the faculty and students carefully considered. Nevertheless, a weak union and strong administration meant that I ended up frantically writing lectures for both halves of the world history survey in my second semester. In my first lecture for the earlier half of world history (to 1500) I focused on “prehistory” and especially the Neolithic lifestyle. In the second hour, I took on the task of differentiating for my students between “Stone Age” lifestyles and the age of civilizations on which we would be concentrating for the rest of the semester. Thus I began the lecture by defining “civilization” which, in my view at the time, entailed the following:
· “centralized government” – civilizations show some type of complex governing structure;
· “expanded economic and technological capacities” – trade and possibly even currency, invention, sometimes written languages, new tools;
· “more elaborate social and cultural structures” – densely populated cities or towns, some type of social stratification, some type of structured religious or mythological practices.
Over the past decade I have read many definitions of civilization – old and new – which I find to be troubling. Some focus on separating “civilized” peoples from “barbarians” and “primitives” on the basis of some assumed racial or cultural characteristic.1 Others merely position rigidly defined civilizational blocs against each other in ages-long struggles (e.g. Huntington 1993). While avoiding these overt misconceptualizations, my definition of 2000 was almost equally troubling. Drawing deeply on the work of Europe-centered archaeologists, historians, and dilettantes like V. Gordon Childe (1950), it ignored critiques from rebel scholars as diverse as Afrocentrists such as Cheikh Anta Diop, subaltern studies scholars like Vinay Lal, and leftist empiricists such as Andre Gunder Frank. For while my definition recognized that any people – regardless of race or ethnicity – couldachieve civilization, it still posited such a civilization as a step forward on a teleological, universal staircase upward from barbarism to modernity. Thus while I can now applaud my then-self for seeking to define a term that would recur frequently in the course, I am chilled at how blithely I had internalized a singular notion of “civilization” that by definition cast as irrelevant or backward any people living without “centralized government” and “expanded economic and technological capacities.”
Yet while this simple example suggests how dissatisfied I would now be with my first efforts at teaching world history, the student reviews from that semester reflect neither an awareness of my inexperience nor dissatisfaction with my approach. Some students may have noticed the inexperience, but most simply dutifully took notes and regurgitated them on the midterm and final exams. I sometimes wonder whether they were aware that they were guinea pigs in a half-formed new offering, and whether such knowledge would unsettle them. Would it scare students to find out that their instructors may completely change their understandings of core course contents over consecutive semesters? Such questions are likely unimportant to the average undergraduate student seeking only to survive their 15-unit course-load and probably a part-time job (or two).
Yet the history instructor cannot afford to ignore this question. History is often described as the study of “change over time.” Almost all of us began our training by learning to take snapshots (“primary sources”) and turn them into narratives of transformation (“secondary sources”). Thus it behooves us, especially, to examine our own changing understandings of the world and the profession. As a young world historian, I can remember being especially affected by William McNeill’s self-examination of his own conversion as a researcher from celebrant of Westernness to global historian of connections in the 25 years following the publication of his ground-breaking The Rise of the West (see McNeill 1990). This brief essay was more valuable in explaining to me the debates and positions underpinning the field of world history than any book-length work. Can examining our teaching records in the same way help us to similarly understand a field as pedagogically rich as world history?
This broad question reverberates in my retrospective evaluation of this excerpt of the second lecture I gave as I started my academic career a decade ago. Like many of my peers, as I stood before that first world history class I was only just barely ahead of my students. This is not to say that I hadn’t had a reasonably long relationship with “history,” or even with global history. Jewish families like mine are notoriously diasporic, and that fact was reflected in the first stories about the past I can remember. These I encountered while on my grandfather’s knee, listening as he explained how he and a few other Polish soldiers serving under British officers and with American equipment had stormed an Italian redoubt full of German troops. I listened to these stories in his apartment in South Africa, while on vacation from my American home.
One thing led to another, and my grandfather’s (slightly exaggerated) stories led to reading Time/Life histories of World War II, and then to an undergraduate degree in history, and finally to graduate work. In the process, I also moved from military history to political history and finally to social history, and studied on three continents. I was, in fact, truly an individual example of the global scope of human experience. Yet in truth I knew nothing about global history, or my own place in it. Like many of my students, my personal feelings of heritage, tradition, and family seemed far distant from my academic understandings of History as a discipline.
Facing the teaching of a world history course for the first time, then, I found myself in the same situation as many of my peers. For one thing, I had no training in world history (still then a rarity as either an undergraduate or graduate course). I was, in fact, an “expert” really only in the nineteenth-century social history of two very small regions in West Africa. On the other hand, I had an ethical and political leaning towards cosmopolitanism that drove me towards a model of world history that focused on peace, interaction, environmental and social justice, and a shared human past (Allardyce 1990).
As a trained professional historian, I knew that I had to teach a history that had a narrative; one that showed the sort of positivistic notions of progress that were central to my being as a good, liberal American. But how was I to express this idea of progress without evaluating societies and differentiating among them? How could I even explain the differences among human societies without positing some as superior? I knew, of course, that the dreaded Eurocentrists were guilty of doing this.2 Yet even Afrocentrists seemed to implicitly accept a consensual set of categories by which societies were to be evaluated, arguing, for instance, that ancient Africa was great through reference to its great monuments and mighty empires. Similarly, even the canonical world historians seemed to argue that early modern Asia was great by evaluating the sizes of its merchant fleets and economic capitalization (Pomeranz 2000; Frank 1998).
I finally found my (temporary) solution not in the work of a historian, but rather a physiologist. Jared Diamond (1997) seemed to be able to explain why and how societies diverged through a simple, provable environmental narrative. His argument – that some societies developed in more favorable environments than others – allowed for an exploration of the differential evolution of human societies while still expounding a unity – and fundamental equality – of humankind. This made it inherently attractive to cosmopolitans like myself. However, what made it attractive to the historian in me was its apparent empiricism and objectivity. Following what Patrick Manning has called the “scientific-cultural” path, it was a quintessential “big history,” mobilizing evidence to refute the idea that Europeans were superior in any racial or cultural quality. However, it still embraced a notion of progress in its focus on the development of civilizations, exemplified by the city and by the kinds of social and economic transformations that came with it. Finally, Diamond’s grand narrative sweep of history, with its decisive argument for environmental rather than racial determinism, and even a case for human unity, all fits neatly into a 15-week structure that covered the whole human history of world (to 1500) in an easily comprehensible package.
Snapshot 2: World History for Graduate Students, San Francisco State University, 2006
Yet while such neat packages are the stock-in-trade of the first-year survey, they tend to also provoke more issues than they resolve. Human history is not neat, but rather messy and complex. This is a lesson that I had learned on a theoretical level, but whose ramifications only really reached me during the next stage of my development as a “world historian.” In 2002, I moved from New Orleans to California, to teach at San Francisco State University. The department of history at SFSU was (and still is) structured in a tripartite division familiar to many departments in the United States: US, Europe, and World. This was a result partly of a long process of internal negotiation and pressures from the strong ethnic studies college, which limited the department’s abilities to offer strong coverage of areas seen as homelands for many of the university’s students.
At the time that I began to teach at SFSU, the “World” division was still something of an academic ghetto for “the rest,” that is, those who didn’t fall into the two “traditional” categories. In other words, it comprised one scholar each for East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as two Latin Americanists. Unlike our US- and European-focused colleagues, who generated a multicourse curriculum for their areas divided chronologically and thematically, most of the courses for the World concentration were surveys of long periods of history for an entire continent.
Shortly before my arrival, however, William Issel had led an initiative to develop a truly transnational World concentration at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Since there were not at the time many graduate students who studied Africa, I volunteered to teach a newly designed graduate course entitled “The World and the West” that would fit this transnational approach. I also briefly taught another newly developed course (History 701) required of all “world history” graduate students. In retrospect, the decision was not a mistake. By moving into “transnational” or global courses, I gained access to numerous readings and debates from other fields that later informed my research. Perhaps more importantly, I came into contact with many of the superb graduate students attracted by SFSU’s MA program in history. Whether officially “World,” “European,” or “US” history students, the students were a varied group of high school teachers, former undergrads seeking a step upward to PhD programs, successful professionals returning to their passion, and aspiring community college instructors. Many of them were influenced to take the courses I offered by the State of California’s transition from “Western civilization” to “world history” at the high school and community college levels.
In History 701, I assigned and therefore read for the first time such canonical works of world history as Ross Dunn’s The New World History (2000) and Patrick Manning’s Navigating World History (2003), as well as monographs by Janet Abu-Lughod, Kenneth Pomeranz, Andre Gunder Frank, and Alfred Crosby. Much of my understanding of these books came from the give-and-take of the seminar format, as students challenged my interpretations and those of their colleagues. In this respect, having a cross-section of fields represented in the class was a great advantage.
Consider part of my syllabus from this course, as I taught it in 2006:
World History for Graduate Students
Abstract
This research-oriented seminar addresses the connections between societies around the world in the modern era. Readings explore contrasting and complementary ecological, economic, political, and cultural narratives. The focus is a truly global understanding of this crucial phase of world history.
Student goals
Students who have completed this course:
· will be able to explain the principal issues, tropes, and themes of world history, and the challenges facing the development of world history as an independent field and a set of epistemological approaches;
· will have evaluated ecological, cultural, political, and sociocultural scholarship on the purported “rise of the west” in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and will be able to present a critical and academically rigorous synthesis of these works;
· will be able to demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which societies, populations, and regions interact in the modern period (ca. 1350–present);
· will be able to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of thematic, comparative, and regional approaches to world history;
· will have evaluated core polemical works in world history and will be able to construct a synthesis that addresses the debate between these works.
As this brief excerpt demonstrates, my purpose was to teach students the models of world history put forward by the World History Association and its leading practitioners. Thus I embraced the definition of world history offered by Patrick Manning (2003), who wrote that it is defined by its focus on “the story of connections within the global human community” and that “the world historian’s work is to portray the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past.”3
My attraction to this kind of world history was symptomatic of my growing cosmopolitanism and sense of social justice. In tandem with many other world historians, I embraced this approach to history as a way to express my commitment to humanitarianism and ethics by retelling the past through those themes. Such a connection has been expressed by leading world historians as far back as 1951, when Ralph E. Turner wrote of the desire to present an “objective, unbiased treatment … [to] further the cooperation of peoples thus made aware of their common bonds, of the harmony resulting from natural contacts, and of a unity asserting itself in spite of apparent difference.”4 More recently the Italian scholar Luigi Cajani (with whom I shared a panel at the 2006 World History Association conference in Long Beach) has written optimistically:
Historical ethnocentrism can be overcome by a world vision of history, a vision not from the bottom, from an ethnic center, but from the top, encompassing the human experience as a whole … On the philosophical level, world history goes arm in arm with cosmopolitanism, as happened during the Enlightenment. Cosmopolitanism is now in a revival phase, linked to the debate on constitutional patriotism, human rights and globalization … (2007: 7)
Not long before, Jerry Bentley, editor of the Journal of World History, had expressed the belief that: “Ecumenical world history has strong potential to serve larger social purposes much more constructively than the xenophobic and hyper-patriotic versions of the global past that are all too prominent in schools throughout the world, including the United States” (Bentley 2005).
In the middle years of the decade, I had imbibed these beliefs with my readings, and the way that I understood them was one that centered empiricism and rationality within a universal moral code. In other words, when I taught History 701 in 2006 I believed that a cosmopolitan world history was the correct and accurate world history as well as the most desirable one.5 Thus my purpose in this course was to help students refute what I saw (and still see) as the myths of an internal, cultural superiority that led to the West’s emergence as the center of a world-system or world-empire in the nineteenth century.6 The approach I chose to take was to assign chauvinistic, Eurocentric histories like David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) alongside others like Andre Gunder Frank’s ReORIENT (1998), and help students engage the debate between them. However, in doing so I firmly believed that students would find Frank’s arguments more compelling than those of Landes, and I certainly did not teach the course in an unbiased manner.
Both the surface assertion of objective, empirical history and the undercurrent of bias are evident in the syllabus statement excerpted above. On the one hand, I called on students to “evaluate” scholarship and present “critical and academically rigorous syntheses” of both individual works and debates between them. Yet I was quite clear that the rise of the West was only a “purported” event. To be fair to myself, I did call on students to determine the limitations of “thematic” and “comparative” as well as “regional” approaches. Yet my entire approach to the class was to attempt to unveil the myths put forward by Landes through the use of Andre Gunder Frank and other world historians.
Snapshot 3: Twentieth-Century World History Survey, University of Stellenbosch, 2008
The world history that I was teaching in 2006 was in part an attack on a metanarrative of inevitable Western superiority. An older generation of historians like William McNeill and Alfred Crosby had challenged their protégés to question the received wisdom that underpinned the “rise of the West” thesis, and scholars such as A.G. Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong (2000) successfully produced and interpreted the kinds of evidence that allowed us to weave a much more complex and global story of the human past than those that came before.
As a US-based, rather leftist and internationalist historian, I had by 2006 become quite comfortable with global historical narratives of interdependence and exchange. On a political level, these gave me tools to work against patriotic histories of the neoconservative right that reduced humanity to perpetually struggling “civilizations” in the service of their foreign policy goals (Huntington 1993). In the multicultural San Francisco State University classroom, they also allowed me to present my students with a shared history that included everyone’s pasts within it. Yet as an Africanist, this universal narrative clashed with my evolving understanding of the role of History (the discipline) in relationship to the African societies I was studying. Scholars in the fields of African studies and African history were, during this same period, beginning to raise the questions of whether the work we did was relevant, helpful, or authentic to the people whose pasts we were portraying.7 I was particularly moved by the arguments of Joseph C. Miller, who wrote that:
Until “world” historians incorporate Africa on its own terms, and focus also on the unique aspects of other world regions that may be easier to force into the appearance of modern modes, the logic of progressive world history is condemned to obscure the dynamism of a truly global past – “global” in the historical sense of multiple and inclusive, rather than in the too-conventional sense of merely macro in scale, and hence singular in concept – behind visions of the modern West writ larger and larger, farther and farther back in time, and inscribed over and over again on the lives of people who in fact proceeded with very different agendas on their minds. It is to them, the Africans and many others, and their visions and strategies, that we must turn to realize the full potential of thinking distinctively as historians – ultimately, true to the centered nature of history, to do so productively about ourselves. (2005: 35)
These scholars echoed the critiques of other researchers, who argued that world history, emanating from North America and Europe, was an imperial or colonial act. (See chapter by Weinstein, this volume.) For example, Vinay Lal wrote:
As far as I am able to judge, “world history” informs the greater part of the people in the world that the only history they have is to catch up to someone else’s history, or else they themselves will become history. Such a history has every potential to be a form of “cultural genocide,” politically disempowering, and destructive of the ecological plurality of knowledge and lifestyles. (2003: 288–289)
These arguments suggested to me that world historians would benefit from the “provincialization” of world history. That is to say, we needed to historicize it as a movement and a field, to examine from where we had created it and its political economy (Lal 2005).8In 2007, I set out to understand the domestic setting of world history within the United States, a country whose citizens dominate it as a subdiscipline and largely officer its structures, including the World History Association and the Journal of World History.9 Yet this task proved too difficult to undertake entirely from “within.” Thus I applied for and happily won a Fulbright grant to study global history in and from South Africa. This year abroad provided a unique opportunity to develop a fresh perspective. As a country that had recently been through a major political upheaval, South Africa was paying close attention to the portrayal of history (e.g. Stolten 2007). This was true not only within its disciplinary bodies and in schools, but also in terms of contests to define national heritage, tradition, memory, and even a sense of nostalgia for various constructed pasts. There were numerous sites in which these contests took place – cinema, newspapers, monuments, museums, and public events. (See Witz, this volume.) One important set of sites were the first-year history courses at South Africa’s universities. Within the university setting in postapartheid South Africa, multiracial democracy had led to a reversal of Eurocentric Western civilization histories and their replacement by courses approximating world history. Concurrently, however, the prevailing situation in South Africa also led to the questioning of History itself as the voice of the nation or of the people in studying African pasts. (See Simo, this volume.)
Because I knew and admired several South African historians who had participated in world history conferences and events, I arrived there expecting scholars and students to have strong opinions on the field. Instead, I found that world history was largely alien to most practitioners and students, with the exception of a small group of scholars. Thus I was frequently asked to explain what world history was. The excerpt below, from a lecture slide I used in a course at the University of Stellenbosch, is an example of my attempts to do so. Historically an Afrikaans-speaking university, Stellenbosch had a rich history of scholars engaged in determining the relationship between European and South African societies, but the history department was only beginning to become more globalized, partly through the work of Dr Sandra Swart, who had begun to offer a global environmental history course. I was able to participate in another young course on twentieth-century global history. My contribution was to give a historiology of twentieth-century history, including the development of the field of world history:
What Is World History?
· World Historians seek to tell stories of the world that don’t focus on Europe or the “West” but rather the whole world.
· World History tells stories about trade, exchange, migration as the engines of historical change.
· World History largely comes out of the United States and Canada, and its focus reflects domestic issues in this region.
· World History is still recognizable as social science “History,” obeying the rules of evidence, data, etc.
As this slide may show, by this point in my career I was beginning to think critically about the meanings inscribed upon the student by world history. By the time I wrote this lecture, six months into my stay in South Africa, I had reached some findings but also was left with a number of questions. The findings are largely reflected in this slide. Beyond the first two (widely accepted) points that world history is about connections and that it seeks to overturn a Eurocentric metanarrative, I was arguing two further points. The first was that world history as it then stood largely reflected political and sociocultural issues in the United States by serving as a rejoinder to both ethnic studies and right-wing patriotic histories of the world.10 Second, I argued that world historians (with some exceptions) had largely sidestepped the issues raised by postcolonial and cultural studies practitioners.
Although not explicitly mentioned in these slides, my discussions of these issues with colleagues in South Africa had left me with several unresolved questions. Who decides the research agendas of world history? Who has the money and the power in the field? What constitutes “history” and who decides who qualifies as a historian? What is the relationship between world history and localized systems of historical consciousness? How does inclusion as subjects or objects of world history benefit the people of Africa? Together, I then believed, my findings and my questions constituted a critique of world history as a set of structures and an approach to studying the past.
Snapshot 4: The World and the West Seminar, San Francisco State University, 2010
However, criticism alone seldom makes for good scholarship. As Caroline Walker Bynum has written in Perspectives on History, historians have in the past decade or so made great strides in teaching our students to read sources critically, but this doesn’t mean they are well prepared to become historians:
We have taught them to be critical of where they find material; we have taught them to expect bias and to study authors for it; we have taught them to ask questions of their material, not just to “accumulate facts.” All to the good. But in the process we have perhaps led them to think that when they have “critiqued” someone else’s position, they have found one of their own; that the work of the historian is to find the flaws in how others put things … (Bynum 2009: 14)
For better or worse, historians don’t merely deconstruct. We also construct and reconstruct. This was a reality of which I was reminded when I returned from South Africa with my array of conclusions about world history in the United States and my questions about the future of a global world history. In striving to catch up with the recent scholarship in my field, I found the “critical” works oddly unsatisfactory except where they were accompanied by sound research and well-rounded narratives. Thus, while I knew that I was no longer satisfied to teach the kinds of universal world histories I had taught in 2000 and 2006, I could not yet decide how to replace them.
One direction forward from the purely critical position was pointed out by Eva-Maria Swidler in her article “Defending Western Civ.” Swidler’s argument is not a defense of the traditional, celebratory Western Civilization course, but rather suggests that world history has raised the discursive system of the “West” to global prominence. As she writes:
Western Civ in all its guises, whether taught by historians or by independent humanities programs, talks explicitly about scientific thinking and rationality, about democracy and individual liberties, about progress. But as historians we know that platitudes are not history. We must bring to bear the critical insights on these themes that history can offer: the questioning of absolute objectivity, the historical construction of knowledge, the socially determined construction of the self that varies so widely across space and time, the manifold ways beyond the modern liberal democracy that the world has seen for people to participate in political decision making. (Swidler 2007)
Contained herein is a powerful argument against resting any cosmopolitan history upon universal, empirical and purportedly anti-Eurocentric narratives. As Swidler notes, whether we like it or not the notion of the “West” is all around us. In order to understand the world, we need to understand the West not as an empirical reality but as a set of social constructions out of which people act. In our world today, anti-immigration sentiment, homophobia, racism, and the realities of business and politics are shaped by ideas of Westness. Any responsible world history, therefore, requires us also to understand this concept, where it came from, and the ways in which it is held. By extension, world history therefore should be a history of other worldings, or ways of understanding the world outside of the discourse of the West, as well.11 What such an understanding of world history requires, therefore, is not universality but instead multiplicity and plurality (Nandy 1995).
This understanding has led me to reenvision all of my world history courses. At the undergraduate level, I no longer concentrate on developing a unified vision of the development and interactions of civilizations. While I still try to give students a framework for reconstructing “what happened,” I only use this as a launching pad to encourage them to explore the different ways in which the world was understood by people in different places and times. I ask questions like “How did West Africans experience and talk about the Atlantic slave trade?” and “How did Mughal and Vijayanagaran subjects discuss the coming of British colonialism?”
Still, in order to get back to this key idea of multiple worldings it is important that students first understand the dominance of discourses of the West today, and begin to deconstruct them. This is the task at the center of the graduate seminar (History 740) that I was teaching in fall 2010. Consider the following syllabus excerpt:
This is a graduate-level research course that revolves around two main tasks:
1. The collective exploration of the historical processes through which the ideas and discourses of “the West” were formed and how it came to be placed in binary opposition to non-modernity, “people-without-history,” and other formulations for the non-west.
2. Individual interaction with primary sources that help to illuminate some aspects of these processes through their historicization and interpretation.
The topics of students’ papers and the sources on which they write are not limited to a specific location or time, so long as they engage the principal topics of the course. This does mean that some places and periods may not be appropriate to this course.
I continue to try to teach world history unbounded by region or geography, but now I construct it as a history of ideas and discourse. From the realm of social and economic history I am proposing to move students into the realm of cultural history, with the dual objectives of teaching students to conduct thick analyses of individual sources and to understand them as artifacts of a global process of constructing the “West” and, by extension, the “world.”
In some respects, I thus find myself having moved away from my early teaching of world history survey courses, in which I concentrated on reconstructing a shared global past. In the middle years of the last decade I had instead been driven to share with my students my growing understanding of how world history has been constructed by historians and laypeople alike. More recently, I have come to work, with my graduate students at least, on deconstructing those histories through understanding the shifting meanings of common tropes like “the West.”
Yet even while I teach this approach, I have also been learning its limits. As scholars as diverse as Carolyn Hamilton (1998) and Jan Vansina (1961) have written, discourse isn’t invented out of nowhere. Rather, it has some discernible relationship to things that “actually happened,” and clearly students still need to have some ability to reconstruct the past if they are also to deconstruct the sources produced out of it. Thus my challenge for future classes is figuring out how to combine these skills in approximately equal measure.
World History as a Work in Progress
Of course, I do not propose my current classes as the right way to teach world history. I would be a hypocrite if I did not appreciate the diverse ways of teaching this subject. Rather, I accept that my world history courses even today are works in progress. As historians, we study “change over time” and we must acknowledge that we and the courses we teach are constantly shifting as well. I suspect these changes are usually, although not always, to the better.
World history, too, is a work in progress. From its North American/European roots to its dominance by US scholars, it is now moving into a phase in which it is truly globalizing under the confederated organizations brought together as NOGWHISTO (Network of Global and World History Organizations), and with many more voices like those included in Part III of this volume. What will happen as more Asian, African, and Latin American scholars find channels to input their global histories into the world history movement? This is an exciting moment, and one that cannot help but influence how we all teach world history. I look forward to reflecting upon it ten years from now.
Notes
1 The literature here is well known and too long to cite, but some disturbing takes and analyses include Fredrickson (1981); Bierstedt (1966); Freeman (1995).
2 See the critique from Blaut (2000).
3 Manning is President and Chairman of the Board of the World History Network, former editor of H-World, and has consulted for more than a dozen universities on their World History programs.
4 Ralph E. Turner, “Working Paper of the Plan for a Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind,” 1951, quoted in Allardyce (1990: 28–29).
5 Bentley is not as clear on this, as he seems to admit in the first pages of “Myths, wagers” that World History is a “mythistory,” but has defended it in other settings as uniquely “critical.”
6 Immanuel Wallerstein’s influence should be clear here.
7 The unpublished work of Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia has particularly influenced my thinking here.
8 Vinay Lal calls for an examination of world history’s political economy in this article.
9 At the time of the writing of this chapter, all of the officers and council members of the World History Association, and all of its past presidents, hail from the United States. The WHA sponsors the publication of two journals – Journal of World History andWorld History Connected (online) – as well as a bulletin. The editors of all of these publications are similarly located in the US. Of course, a number of younger but important institutions have emerged outside of the US, such as the Europe-based Journal of Global History and the new Asian and African associations of world historians affiliated with the WHA.
10 I expand upon this in Getz (2012).
11 There are fields outside of history that are pursuing this line much more effectively than we are; e.g. Tickner and Waever (2009), Connery and Wilson (2007). (See chapter by Northrop, this volume.)
References
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