What is Global History? / Edition 1

by Pamela Kyle Crossley

Overview

Global and world history address the deep structural changes that have shaped human experience. Many are material, related to environmental and climatic alteration, to the domestication of livestock and development of agriculture, to technology, to disease, and to variations in human immunity, reproduction, and physiology.

Others are social and cultural, touching upon issues of migration, trade, language development and differentiation, institutions of enslavement and of freedom, traditions of marriage and child-rearing, the emergence of large-scale political organization from early kingdoms to vast empires, republics and federations, and the management of war and peace.

To deal with such challenging issues, global historians draw upon new techniques of analysis and comparison. But they also continue venerable traditions, inherited from the earliest civilizations, of narrating the past on the most comprehensive and significant scale possible.

This book examines the long search for an integrated human story, and particularly the points at which rapid changes of philosophy and perspective in the twentieth century transformed the historical disciplines. It provides the perfect introduction to global history for students and scholars alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745633015
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	03/17/2008
Series:	What is History?
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Pamela Kyle Crossley is Robert 1932 and Barbara Black Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Chapter 1 The Great Story Impulse.

Chapter 2 Divergence.

Chapter 3 Convergence.

Chapter 4 Contagion.

Chapter 5 Systems.

Chapter 6 What Global History Is.

Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"A short book on a big subject ... A useful volume with which tointroduce students to theories and particular authors as they cometo make their own assessment of 'deep forces'."
History

"An outstanding introduction to the problems and possibilitiesof global history. Professor Crossley has fearlessly negotiated herway through a vast body of literature, full of contradictions andconundrums, and emerged with brilliant heuristic strategies forachieving the impossible."

Richard J. Smith, Rice University

"In learned and lucid prose, this slim volume conveys the greatdebates and documentary advances through which global historybecame a major new field of study. Pamela Kyle Crossley traces theevolution of four interpretive approaches and reaches an astuteconclusion on 'what global history is'. This book will enable awide readership to join productively in the discussion on globalchange."

Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh

From the Publisher