21st Century Narratives Of World History

This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.

For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical narratives work, illuminating the ways they can bind together events, shape an argument and lend support to ideology. From ancient Greece to modern-day bestsellers, the studies gathered here offer a wide-ranging analysis of the textual strategies used by historians. They show how in spite of the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ways in which historians tell their stories are inevitably conditioned by their discursive contexts.

National history has once again become a battlefield. In internal political conflicts, which are fought on the terrain of popular culture, museums, schoolbooks, and memorial politics, it has taken on a newly important and contested role. Irrespective of national specifics, the narratives of new nationalism are quite similar everywhere. National history is said to stretch back many centuries, expressesing the historical continuity of a homogeneous people and its timeless character. This people struggles for independence, guided by towering leaders and inspired by the sacrifice of martyrs. Unlike earlier forms of nationalism, the main enemies are no longer neighbouring states, but international and supranational institutions. To use national history as an integrative tool, new nationalists claim that the media and school history curricula should not contest or question the nation and its great historical deeds, as doubts threaten to weaken and dishonour the nation. This book offers a broad international overview of the rhetoric, contents, and contexts of the rise of these renewed national historical narratives, and of how professional historians have reacted to these phenomena. The contributions focus on a wide range of representative nations from around all over the globe.

How did the modern world get to be the way it is? How did we come to live in a globalized, industrialized, capitalistic set of nation-states? Moving beyond Eurocentric explanations and histories that revolve around the rise of the West, distinguished historian Robert B. Marks explores the roles of Asia, Africa, and the New World in the global story. He defines the modern world as marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, and an escape from environmental constraints. Bringing the saga to the present, Marks considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the 20th century and the sole superpower by the 21st century; the powerful resurgence of Asia; and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment.

In the twenty-first century, East Asia has been increasingly marked both by tensions at a government level and a chauvinistic mood among the polity. While China’s rise is in one respect the proximate driver of these changes in tone, it draws on a range of unresolved grievances among the respective historical narratives of Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and the Koreas. These conflicting views of the region’s past are a crucial barrier to its cohesive and stable future. This book brings together East Asian scholars from a range of academic disciplines, including China historians, political historians and political scientists to illuminate the interconnectedness of East Asia and discuss how a shared historical narrative might be constructed. Their contributions are organised into 3 parts focusing respectively on historical narratives of China, historical narratives of East Asia, and reconciling historical narratives. The book will appeal to researcher interested in the historical narratives of international relations in East Asia.

Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future (in visions of the future of technology, ecology and nuclear warfare) and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened. This radical theory of history challenges narrative conceptualizations of history which assume a past potential of humanity unfolding over time to reach future fulfillment and seeks new ways of conceptualizing the altered socio-cultural concerns Western societies are currently facing. By creating a novel set of concepts to make sense of our altered historical condition regarding both history understood as the course of human affairs and historical writing, History in Times of Unprecedented Change offers a highly original and engaging take on the state of history and historical theory in the present and beyond.

Leading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written. Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as they share their ideas. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of individuals’ active role and their place in society as the keys to understanding the way people and ideas interact. Hunt also reveals how surprising new perspectives on society and the self offer promising new ways of thinking about the meaning and purpose of history in our time.