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Lecture 1: What is Global History?
The Study of History
- History at Secondary school is focused on time, dates, and places. And the questions
that start with what/why/how?
- History at University is a debate without end (“History is an argument without end”,
Pieter Geyl). And the questions will be about causality, processes, analysis, and debate
alternative factors and explanations.
- Different perspectives will be explored.
- Secondary school will be used as a foundation to further explore historical events.
- Connected to many other concepts from other subjects.
- “The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see” - Sir Winston
Churchill
→ In this course, history of way back will be explored in order to understand processes,
trends, developments, and why the world today looks like it does.
- Provides a bird’s eye view to better understand the present.
What is History?
- History deals with the human experience. The human experience is very broad, and is
potentially limitless because of the number of individuals around the globe over the
course of time.
- It is bound by time and space. But also by structure and process, agency, and story.
→ Structures and processes relate to development over time.
- History revolves around continuity and change, and trends and turning points.
- History is the study of the past.
- History is the study of change over time in the past.
- The past may be over, but history itself changes over time.
Historical Research
Historical investigation:
- Requires sources:
- Direct (Primary) sources = sources from people that were present during the
time of the occurrence.
→ Such as: archives, diaries, documents, newspapers, eye witness accounts,
interviews
- Indirect (Secondary) sources: sources from people that were not present during
the time of occurrence.
→ Such as: articles that are the subject of (re)interpretation of these events
- Discovery:
- Get information through investigation
- Information through debates
- Investigate
- Reconstruction: elements from reconstruction of historical events could be chronology
(= what happened, and in what order) and causality (= what caused specific
events/phenomena to happen, and how can we explain this causality)
- Interpretation of sources and evidence-analysis:
- Interpretation leads to discussion
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- Discussion leads to debate where differing interpretations and ideas are
investigated
Three important concepts in the Academic Study of History / Historical Science
1. Historicism:
- Historicism means that each period in history is interpreted as unique beliefs and values
and is best understood only in their own historical context.
- These internal meanings of history need to be discovered by historials by dissecting the
circumstances and context.
- = Explains why people acted the way they did by being in those people’s shoes
and looking through their eyes.
- Context is important.
- Our own perceptions should not be involved when judging and exploring the
events of the past, rather they should be looked at on their own.
- Our current preoccupations serve as an obstacle.
- Contemporary benchmarks and standards need to be eliminated.
- Sources need to be accountable and in order so that stories can be recounted
as they were.
- These internal meanings of history need to be discovered by historians by
dissecting the circumstances and contexts. The further back you go in history,
the harder it gets to recreate the atmosphere of those times.
2. Metahistory:
- Metahistory is the quest for all-encompassing/overall meaning in history
- Is there a pattern in history? Can regularities be observed throughout history?
- Does history move towards progress (Hegel)
- Example: European Middle Ages: History moved towards the Last Judgement and Divine
intervention explained events and occurrences based on the idea of Metahistory.
- Problems:
- What is the evidence? How is the evidence presented? Is it speculative? Are
certain aspects more emphasized than other aspects in order to substantiate the
claims of history moving to a purported end goal or aim?
- Some aspects of history may be priorities in order to create a cohesive history,
which is a downside of metahistory.
- People believed history was moving towards a purported end goal (or divine
intervention)
=> Teleological reasoning (Teleology)
3. Historiography:
- Historiography is the discussion of interpretations of the past (debate about history)
- Historiography concerns the study of the writing of history.
- Focuses on historical arguments, theories, and interpretations of the past, which change
over time.
- How have these schools of thought on particular events changed over time?
- One school of thought in the 20th century suggested the Soviets aggression
were to blame for the Cold War => Traditionalist
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- The school of thought that blamed the West for the Cold War (American
economic imperialism) => Revisionist
- The third school of thought was less concerned with ideologies and suggested
that everyone had a part in causing the war, it was the dynamic interaction
between the two superpowers (non-Western perspective) => Post-Revisionist
Trends in Historiography
- History had to do with: states, wars, and men. This can still be seen in political history.
- In the 20th century it was realized how narrow-minded it was to look at history through
one lens, thus emerging economic history and social history.
→ Economic history has to do with explaining the development and its interactions with
politics.
- Women and Gender history
- Cultural history and the history of ideas
- Local history = history of certain towns/villages/communities
- Microhistory = history of households/families/individuals
- Subaltern history = history of servants (lower levels of hierarchy), such as slaves
- History of animals and Disability History: history that have not received much attention
upon till a certain point (more recent)
- Global History
Can we learn from History?
- “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” - George Santayana
- History needs to be studied
- History offers a wealth of information about past human experiences which may
make us wiser
- It is a misconception that history repeats itself
History and Prediction?
- People cannot predict certain historical events
- Examples: No one was able to predict the end of the Cold War, 9/11, the financial crisis,
or the corona pandemic
Historical Analogies
- Facissm: the end of Empire ideas
- Images below: pivotal moments in the 20th century
> June 1914 Sarajevo Archduke Ferdinand (left): on the edge of the outbreak of the
First World War just moments before Ferdinand was shot
> 1938 Munich Appeasement (right): appeasement of dictators
→ Can we appease people with bad intentions
Skills of a Historian
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- Research: use and interpretation of sources
- Judgment: write persuasive arguments
- Knowing languages
- Close reading and interpretation of old sources
- Concise writing
- Question-framing
- Presentation
Global History and its Historiography
Global History has a distinct historiography.
There are 3 strands of thinking about the history of the globe:
1. Universal or Big History
2. World history
3. Global History
1. Universal History / Big History
- Big History draws on the idea of geological time (As seen on image below)
- It is based on geological history and the physical layers found on rocks
→ To explain the different forms of life that can be studied by analyzing fossils and
imprints
- Humans are one small piece > Looking at different time frames
The Anthropocene (As seen on image below):
- Transitioning to a new geological epoch (= a particular period of time in history)
→ Alternative way of schematically representing geological time by emphasizing the
layers
- Geologists when studying the planet’s surface, oceans, and atmosphere have identified
the most recent epoch as the Holocene.
- Holocene started between 11,700 years ago (1750-1800)
- Antrope in Greek means human
- For geologists to find a new geological epoch (new phase in our planetary history) a
requirement is the visibility in the earth surface
