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Letter to the Editors
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Editorial Note: We received this letter from
Ekaterina Marchenko, a student in Alice Catherine Carl's world history class
at the University of Tennessee at Martin, after she read William McNeil's
essay in Volume 1:1 of WHC.
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After reading the article by William H. McNeil, "An Emerging Consensus about
World History, Volume 1", I concluded that World History does not stand
in one place unchanged. On the contrary, it moves on without stopping since
its independent variable is time, and time is unstoppable. Therefore, from
this statement, I can derive a general definition of history as the study
of the past events of human societies, and to be more exact, of the rise
and fall of different civilizations through time. McNeill calls this notion
an ecological principle, which is a new idea grounded in an examination
of the world as a global entity. And from this raw material given by nature,
we, human beings, as the most intelligent beings on the planet Earth, grow.
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In other words, as I understood McNeil's theory,
we start small and branch out by means of communication. That way, greater
interaction and merging are possible. Through cooperation and conflict,
and the rise and fall of our civilizations, we gain new experience, expand,
and globalize.
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History drives our lives, and the more we know about
our past the better off we are in improving our future. To design effective
text books and teaching tactics on World History is challenging. It is impossible
to lecture on this subject by mentioning every single detail—it would
take a lifetime to do that. We must therefore study the most important and
significant factors, but first we must prioritize and organize them.
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After probing several new World History textbooks,
I have found that they generally seem to concentrate not just on individual
societies and civilizations separately like they used to, but to emphasize
the intricate web of interactions between them. Therefore, the new generation
of history books follows many points that McNeill describes in his article.
History is something you can not get a hold on for long. It is changing
and so do the methods of teaching it. Historians are looking for better
and more effective ways to organize this ever-increasing and expanding story
of humankind. Authors of new textbooks are trying to present history in
a more global perspective in the form of webs. And that's one of the major
points McNeil makes in his article, "The Emerging Consensus about World
History." Other similarities include: communications, transportation, exchange,
cooperation, and even a newly emerging ecological principle. Authors of
these publications mentioned one of their major themes, environment, being
a foundation from which we start to develop. |
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We can see from several samples of the newest World
History textbooks that different authors are coming up with common themes.
Although there are still some discrepancies about the minor areas of emphasis,
the overall structure of their projects seems to converge into a common
idea. That idea is explicitly presented by McNeill in his article as the
web of communications which in turn enables the globalization of the world.
This, in turn, justifies a truly global approach to world history.
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Ekaterina Marchenko
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