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global history

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• Originally published 11/27/2013

  Diminishing Returns of the Global Turn

  Global history has met the law of diminishing returns in its insights.

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• Originally published 11/20/2013

  In Defense of Global History

  David Bell was too harsh on Emily Rosenberg's "A World Connecting: 1870-1945."

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• Originally published 10/28/2013

  This Is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network

  Historians have been applying the network -- the controlling metaphor of the digital age -- to everything, even the distant past. Maybe that's not such a great idea.

• Originally published 05/23/2013

  David Cannadine: Why Do Historians Insist on Dividing Us?

  Sir David Cannadine, a professor of history at Princeton University, has taught at the University of Cambridge and Columbia University. His most recent book, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.When Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1976, he concluded his acceptance speech with these wise, generous, and tolerant words: "There is no simple choice between the children of light and the children of darkness." But a quarter of a century later, Bellow's fellow American, President George W. Bush, took a very different view, insisting that there was, indeed, such a straightforward choice between good and evil. "When I was coming up," he opined, "it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them. Today we're not so sure who the they are, but we know they're still there." Here was a view of the world, of human association and of human nature, that assumes a polarized, Manichean division, built around collective identities that are internally coherent and homogeneous, and that are always latently or actually in conflict. The choice between them is, therefore, very simple and very clear.

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• Originally published 05/03/2013

  Getting Beyond the "Clash of Civilizations"

  The world, undivided. Image via Shutterstock.

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• Originally published 01/16/2013

  In Memoriam: Gerda Lerner

  Gerda Lerner in an 2012 interview. Credit: UW-Madison.Gerda Lerner, eminent scholar and pioneer in the field of women’s history, passed away on January 2, 2013, at age 92. There are so many ways and reasons to remember Gerda Lerner: her activism on behalf of women and women historians; her invaluable scholarship; her irascibility in the face of injustice; her demands on herself and on the profession; her inspiration and her gifts.