History of the World

There are few important qualities that set the history of the world apart from other forms of history. Earth historians use a wide-angle lens, though they do not always consider the whole world as their unit of analysis. They tend to oppress individual nations or civilizations, and then focus on distinctly defined regions, including areas of communication, or the ways in which people, goods and ideas travel through the regions through migration, conquest, and trade. Many secular historians believe that the historical perspective must be analyzed in terms of various dynamics, such as, but not limited to, the most complex ones. Some of the world's history has a small interim framework, examining world events in a decade or even in one year. Some historians use extended periods, beginning with the Big Bang to explore history on a cosmic scale. The history of a single commodity such as salt, sugar, or silver can be the history of the world, such as singles, organizations, or ideas.

In the twenty-first century, world historians built on the roots of various national and regional cultures to create a kind of global history, operating more and more from sources available in many languages ​​and in many places. World history today is a field of research, consisting of academic journals, conferences, books, and research institutes, as well as a field of teaching, from elementary school to postgraduate work. Scholars, teachers and students have developed new methods and materials and regularly participate in debates about theory, methodology, and content on websites, blogs, and print.

People have been making history for a long time. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus traced his life to the Persians and Greeks as far as he knew, and the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian told a story about the encyclopedic introduction to events, activities, and histories of emperors, nobles, and other important people. Ancient writers in India, Europe, and the Islamic world developed a “universal history” that began with the creation of the world, and from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century scholars, poets, monks, physicians, obscure princes, former slaves, and others. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the focus on the history of the profession - that is, the history written by university-trained men - became a world power, accompanied by the growing importance of nations as political units and nationalism.

But after World War II, scholars and educators began to challenge organized history throughout the world. In the United States, local university programs are increasingly training people to study in many parts of the world, some trained historians are beginning to write jobs in general, and college professors and high school teachers are studying world history. In Europe, the study of diplomatic relations was gradually developing into a monarchy, an international empire, and so-called "overseas" history. Beginning in the 1980's, academics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America criticized critical national and international history as they focused on Europe, setting up various institutions or requesting more world history. The 1990s brought some new clues, including international history, histoire croisée, Transgesgeschichte, Atlantic World history, borderlands history, connected history, world planning history, diasporic history, and many more. Some historians began to define their field as a world history, showing the increasing integration of regions of the world into a single system through globalization, although some historians see the world and world history alike.

Today world history has many facets and many words. The World History Association is proud to be one of those voices, and we hope you look elsewhere on this site to see everything we do, including publications, conferences and awards. The Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), an international umbrella group owned by the World History Association, has prepared a list of the latest workbooks in world history that can provide an overview of current trends in global history education.