Making Sense of WH
The main purpose of this set of pages is to discuss the book Making Sense of World History (available from Routledge in both open access and print format). I should note, though, that there are other projects associated with this larger project:
It of course draws extensively on my previous research in history of technology, economic history, interdisciplinary studies, and knowledge organization.
I wrote several articles for the ABC-Clio Encyclopedia of World History, including a long essay in the introductory volume on drawing lessons from World History. I have since drafted three essays for ABC-Clio’s Online Database for World History: The Modern Era.
I presented “Organizing Devices for World History” at the World History Association, Ghent, Belgium, July, 2016.
I presented "Interdisciplinarity and World History" at the regional conference of the World History Association in Honolulu in February 2017.
I organized a panel on and presented on "Drawing Lessons from World History" at the World History Association, Boston, June 2017.
I organized a Forum on "Organizing World History" for World History Connected which appeared in February, 2018. I drafted both a paper describing my own approach to world history as well as a brief introductory essay for the Forum as a whole. See http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/15.1/index.html. [Note that the journal has now moved to George Washington University Press. It is still online.]
I and the participants in this Forum held a roundtable at the World History Association conference in Milwaukee in June, 2018.
I presented "Knowledge Organization and the History of the World," at the International Society for Knowledge Organization conference in Porto, Portugal in July 2018. The paper appears in the conference proceedings.
I organized and presented in a Forum on "Why teach World History?" at the WHA conference in Bilbao, June 2022. The papers from that forum, including mine, will be published in World History Connected in October 2023.
I organized a forum on democratic backsliding at the WHA conference in Pittsburgh, June 2023. We have discussed publishing this.
I made a presentation on "Conceptualizing World History" at that conference. I hope to publish that presentation.
The Book Project: Making Sense of World History
World History courses are increasingly popular in both the United States and the rest of the world. Yet the field is divided as to how to organize a World History textbook. And there is a constant complaint among both teachers and students that it is hard to provide coherence to such a course. Students struggle to draw connections between Babylonians, Aztecs, and Polynesians.
My solution is to use a set of innocuous organizing devices that provide the necessary coherence without interfering with narrative flow or forcing the narrative into a narrow theoretical perspective.
First I use over 30 flowchart diagrams to capture the main influences on and effects of key historical events and processes. Effects in early diagrams such as state formation become influences in later diagrams, highlighting for the student that history is a process in which polity, economy, culture, and other key themes interact in a cumulative fashion through time. I take care, nevertheless, to indicate to students that such diagrams necessarily simplify -- mastering the diagrams is no substitute for close reading of the text, but a useful complement to doing so.
When some 20 key types of human actor enter the story -- farmers, rulers, merchants, and over a dozen others -- I discuss the main challenges that these face. For example, farmers need to defend against theft, and rulers need to supervise self-interested bureaucrats. We can then compare how these challenges are addressed (or not) in various times and places throughout the book. World history texts generally record how empire after empire falls due to corruption and over-powerful provincial governors, but miss the opportunity to connect these experiences.
I employ some 50 in-text boxes to briefly explore topics that lend themselves to a treatment beyond the temporal boundaries of a particular chapter: the histories of timekeeping or rubber, or the role that cities play in history. These Boxes also address organizing material such as Malthusian understandings of the relationship between population growth and incomes.
And I employ the simplest version of evolutionary analysis in studying culture, institutions, technology and science, and art. We can then ask why certain (not-quite-random) mutations were selected (and by who), and how these were transmitted across time and space. Evolutionary analysis guides us to appreciate how each society builds on what went before.
Last but not least, I open each chapter with some guiding (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How) questions, as well as a brief discussion of how the chapter builds upon preceding chapters and sets the stage for later chapters.
Comments on the Table of Contents
See also the Previous Research that informs this project.