Departments

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global history

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    11/10/2020

    The Prosperity Hoax

    A 2020 report on global poverty suggests that the problem is getting worse, directly attacking the methodologies the World Bank has used for decades to justify global capitalism as an anti-poverty program. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    10/16/2020

    Toward a Global History of White Supremacy

    by Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton

    We need to understand the history of global connections between white supremacists if we are to grasp what has sustained white nationalism despite global trends toward liberation and equality.

  • SOURCE: BBC
    9/23/2020

    Are We Living at the "Hinge of History"?

    Journalist Richard Fisher examines the argument that the present--this moment--is the most important juncture in human history because human capacity to affect the planet outstrips human wisdom to direct that capacity.

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    9/13/2020

    Black Lives Matter But Slavery Isn’t Our Only Narrative

    by Aretha Phiri and Michelle M. Wright

    "Black folks are astonishingly diverse in their cultures, histories, languages, religions, so no single definition of Blackness is going to fit everyone. When we fail to consider this, we effectively leave many Black people out of the conversation."

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    9/10/2020

    A New Theory of Western Civilization (Review)

    "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the latest addition to the Big History category. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe.

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    3/3/2020

    How Pandemics Change History

    In his new book, “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” Frank M. Snowden, a professor emeritus of history and the history of medicine at Yale, examines the ways in which disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions, and entrenched racial and economic discrimination.

  • SOURCE: Imperial & Global Forum
    11-20-13

    In Defense of Global History

    by Marc-William Palen

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

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
    5-20-13

    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.

  • In Memoriam: Gerda Lerner

    by Jennifer Scanlon

    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.