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The February 2017 issue of World History Connected features
a powerful Forum, introduced by Laura Mitchell and Andrea Felber Seligman. They remind us that biographies offer unique opportunities to combine narrative
history with explicit attention to the thinking skills that are central to our
discipline," but seek to move biographical studies beyond the usual
suspects. They demonstrate how "recent
scholarship has transformed the genre, democratizing and expanding a form once
reserved only for the study of well-known political and cultural leaders. With
new and increasingly diverse biographies available, there are exciting
possibilities for humanizing high school and college classes while further
developing students' analytical skills." They draw attention to recent methodological trajectories that have
"blurred boundaries among microhistory, life history, and social history,
challenging the notion that biography applied only to the powerful, or the
already famous." The essays in the Forum demonstrate the validity of these
remarks through case studies, which are followed by guidance from Seligman on
employing this revived and expanded approach in the classroom.
This issue offers two studies of use to all practitioners of
world history. The first, by famed historian of the ancient world, Stanley
Burstein, goes where few world historians have ventured, into the history of
the ancient Black Sea urban trading world of Chersonesus in the southwestern
Crimea. Founded as a Greek colony some 2,500 years ago, its trade network encompassed
the Ukraine and reached as far as ancient Rhodes. Like the biographical
approach pursued in the Forum, Burstein employs this lesser-known state to
suggest how it can illuminate the complexities of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and
Venetian worlds. The second, by
Digital Resource editor John Maunu, offers resources on Comparative World
History, which helped lay the foundation for world history and still enriches
historical study.
The reviews of books in this issue are particularly rich,
ranging in subject from a global history of time, capitalism, and abolitionist
movements in global perspective, to Iran in world history and India during the
Second World War.
Future issues of World History Connected will explore, among other topics, the debate
over global history vs world History and the continuing controversies over the
nature of writing on Western and World History.
Marc Jason Gilbert, Editor
Hawai'i Pacific University
Marc Jason Gilbert is Professor of History and National Endowment for the Humanities Endowed Chair in World History at Hawai'i Pacific University. He can be reached at mgilbert@hpu.edu. |
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