World History From 1500

World History , Global History or Transnational history (not to be confused with Diplomatic or International History ) is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective.

Overview

World History looks for common patterns that emerge across all cultures. World historians use a thematic approach, with two major focal points: integration (how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together) and difference (how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experience).

The study of world history is in some ways a product of the current period of accelerated globalization. This period tends to both integrate various cultures and to highlight their differences.

Organization

The advent of World History as a distinct field of study was heralded in the 1980s by the creation of the World History Association and of graduate programs at a handful of universities. Over the past 20 years, scholarly publications, professional and academic organizations, and graduate programs in World History have proliferated. It has become an increasingly popular approach to teaching history in American high schools and colleges. Many new textbooks are being published with a World History approach.

The World History Association publishes the Journal of World History every quarter since 1990. The H-World discussion list serves as a network of communication among practitioners of world history, with discussions among scholars, announcements, syllabi, bibliographies and book reviews.

Teaching

In college curricula, it became a popular replacement for courses on Western Civilization, beginning in the 1970s. Professors Patrick Manning (Professor), previously of Northeastern University and now at the University of Pittsburgh's World History Center; and Rosee Dunn at San Diego State are leaders in promoting innovative teaching methods.

Theoretical and scholarly studies

Herodotus (5th century BC) was a world historian as well as founder of Greek historiography. His History presents insightful and lively discussions of the customs, geography, and history of Mediterranean peoples, particularly the Egyptians. However, his great rival 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; Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) aspired to combine the logical rigor of Thucydides with the scope of Herodotus.

Divine intervention

Chinese, Muslim, Indian and Christian traditions of learning emphasize that Gods determined history and humans played only supporting roles. Thus Saint Augustine City of God (413-26 AD) distinguished sharply between divine purpose and disjointed human history. In Christian Europe narrative writing was replaced by annals and chronicles that often stressed the trivial and the miraculous.

In China Sima Qian circa 100 BC presented a model of Chinese history that assumed Heaven chooses virtuous hereditary rulers, then arranges events so that they were overthrown when a ruling dynasty became corrupt. Each new dynasty begins virtuous and strong, but then decays, provoking the transfer of Heaven's mandate to a new ruler. The test of virtue in a new dynasty is success in being obeyed by China and neighboring barbarians. After 2000 years Sima Qian's model still dominates scholarship, even among westerners who do not believe that the ruler's personal virtue assures divine support.

One Arab scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) broke with traditionalism and offered a strikingly modern model of historical change in Muqaddimah, a brilliant exposition of the methodology of scientific history. Ibn Khaldun focused on the reasons for the rise and fall of civilization, arguing that the causes of change are to be sought in the economic and social structure of society. His work was largely ignored in the Muslim world. Otherwise the Muslim, Chinese and Indian intellectuals held fast to a religious traditionalism, leaving them unprepared to advise national leaders on how to confront European imperialism as it reached into Asia after 1500.

Europe

While the Chinese, Muslim, and African and Indian traditions continued their theocentric historiography, there was a radical challenge to it in Christian Europe during the Renaissance. Historians such as Machiavelli ignored divine intervention and stressed that men made their own history, and that rulers should study history in order to shape the future. European scholars began a more systematic study of history. Voltaire (1694–1778), the leading intellectual of the French Enlightenment used comparative history, as in Essay on Manners (1753), to ridicule Christian folly and promote the rule of reason. Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) introduced the perspective of the Scottish Enlightenment in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in Italy broke new ground with his Scienza nuova seconda (The New Science) in 1725. Vico saw history as the expression of human will and deeds. He argued that men are historical entities and that human nature changes over time. Each epoch should be seen as a whole in which all aspects of culture—art, religion, philosophy, politics, and economics—are interrelated (a point developed later by Oswald Spengler. Vico showed that myth, poetry, and art are entry points to discovering the true spirit of a culture. Vico outlined a conception of historical development in which great cultures, like Rome, undergo cycles of growth and decline. His ideas were out of fashion during the Enlightenment, but influenced the Romantic historians after 1800.

A major thoeretical foundation for world history was given by German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who saw the modern Prussian state as the highest stage of world development.

20th century writers

Influential writers who have reached wide audiences including H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson, and Lewis Mumford. Scholars working the field include Eric Voegelin, William H. McNeill and Michael Mann..

Spengler's Decline of the West (2 vol 1919-1922) compared nine organic cultures: Egyptian (3400 BC-1200 BC), Indian (1500 BC-1100 BC), Chinese (1300 BC-AD 200), Classical (1100 BC-400 BC), Byzantine (AD 300-1100), Aztec (AD 1300-1500), Arabian (AD 300-1250), Mayan (AD 600-960), and Western (AD 900-1900). His book was a smashing success among intellectuals worldwide as it predicted the disintegration of European and American civilization after a violent "age of Caesarism," arguing by detailed analogies with other civilizations. It deepened the post-World War I pessimism in Europe, and was warmly received by intellectuals in China, India and Latin America who hoped his predictions of the collapse of European empires would soon come true.

In 1936-1954, Toynbee's ten-volume A Study of History came out in three separate installments. He followed Spengler in taking a comparative topical approach to independent civilizations. Toynbee's said they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. Toynbee rejected Spengler's biological model of civilizations as organisms with a typical life span of 1,000 years. Like Sima Qian Toynbee explained decline as due to their moral failure. Many readers rejoiced in his implication (in vols. 1-6) that only a return to some form of Catholicism could halt the breakdown of western civilization which began with the Reformation. Volumes 7-10, published in 1954 abandoned the religious message and his popular audience slipped away, while scholars gleefully picked apart his mistakes.,

McNeill wrote The Rise of the West (1965) to improve upon Toynbee by showing how the separate civilizations of Eurasia interacted from the very beginning of their history, borrowing critical skills from one another, and thus precipitating still further change as adjustment between traditional old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary. McNeill took a broad approach organized around 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.

Academic historians, who increasingly specialize and demand the use of primary sources, tend to disparage scholarship in world history as attempting the impossible.

Recent themes

In recent years, the relationship between African and world history has shifted rapidly from one of antipathy to one of engagement and synthesis. Reynolds (2007) surveys the relationship between African and world histories, with an emphasis on the tension between the area studies paradigm and the growing world history emphasis on connections and exchange across regional boundaries. A closer examination of recent exchanges and debates over the merits of t

Lecture Notes: World History 104- World History from ...

Course Assignments: World History from 1500 ... WORLD HISTORY 104 All Sections Instructor: Dr. Eric Mayer, Office No. ScL26

...

WORLD HISTORY 1500 WORLD HISTORY 1500 ...

History 202.4 Kirk W. Larsen World History 1500-present JFSB 2151 MWF, 2:00-2:50 pm; JFSB B190 (801) 422-3445 kwlarsen67@gmail.com WORLD HISTORY 1500 WORLD HISTORY 1500 WORLD ...

...

Lecture Notes: History 3a - World History to 1500

VICTOR VALLEY COLLEGE WORLD HISTORY 103. Spring 2010 (all Mayer sections) Instructor: Dr. Eric Mayer, Office No. ScL26 Telephone: 245-4271 (ext. 2299)

...

World History Since 1500, History 3402/5402*

Senior Seminar: World History Since 1500, History 4004 Fall 2006 Social Sciences Building 224. Andrew Hurley Lucas 417 516-5705; ahurley@umsl.edu Office Hours: Tuesday 10:45-11:45; 5-6, and ...

...

Amazon.com: Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World ...

Amazon.com: Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500-1850 (9780072848014): Jack Goldstone: Books

...

World History, 1500-1800

HIST 104: World History I. Prof. Lisa Wolverton - University of Oregon - Fall 2009 . Back to syllabus . FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE . DON’T FORGET TO BRING A GREEN BOOK!

...

World History 1500 to the Present

World History 1500 to the Present Dr. Ruth S. Hertzberg. COURSE: Welcome to World History, the course where you learn more, more, more than you ever learned befoe and more than you ...

...

Amazon.com: The World: A Brief History : To 1500 ...

Amazon.com: The World: A Brief History : To 1500 (9780136008873): Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Books

...

1500–1599 (A.D.) World History — Infoplease.com

1501 First black slaves in America brought to Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. c. 1503 Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo sculpts the David (1504).

...

The Incas and World History Circa 1500: Height of the ...

At the zenith of the Inca Empire, what was happening in the world? Here is a snapshot of world history putting into perspective the Inca civilization at its height.

...