Laura J. Mitchell

Ross E. Dunn

Kerry Ward

The New World History is a comprehensive volume of essays selected to enrich world history teaching and scholarship in this rapidly expanding field. The forty-four articles in this book take stock of the history, evolving literature, and current trajectories of new world history. These essays, together with the editorsÕ introductions to thematic chapters, encourage educators and students to reflect critically on the development of the field and to explore concepts, approaches, and insights valuable to their own work. The selections are organized in ten chapters that survey the history of the movement, the seminal ideas of founding thinkers and todayÕs practitioners, changing concepts of world historical space and time, comparative methods, environmental history, the Òbig historyÓ movement, globalization, debates over the meaning of Western power, and ongoing questions about the intellectual premises and assumptions that have shaped the field.

A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers

The New World History

Alan Karras

This collection of essays asserts the specific value of world history research and teaching, showing how the field contributes to the larger historical profession and offering concrete suggestions to develop more interaction between the academy and the public. The twelve contributors, each with their own academic areas of interest, are experienced scholars and classroom teachers. Uniting them together in this volume is their professional relationship with Jerry H. Bentley (1949–2012). This shared connection served as a catalyst to showcase Bentley’s enduring legacy: a commitment to investigating large-scale questions with detailed empirical evidence that explains the human condition—documenting both patterns of similarity and difference in ways that account for regional and temporal variations. The volume continues Bentley’s meticulous attention to world historical methods: focus on scale, cross-cultural encounter, comparison, periodization, critical geography, and interdisciplinarity. Encounters Old and New in World History responds to provocations that Jerry Bentley tendered in his scholarship and through his professional activities. Contributors interrogate the institutional settings, disciplinary proclivities, methodological choices, and diverse source bases of world history research and teaching. Several essays address the ways in which present-day concerns influence research on local and global scales. Other essays pay particular attention to the production and circulation of knowledge across regional, temporal, and class boundaries, as well as between the academy and the wider public. Claiming the centrality of globally informed and focused approaches to historical inquiry, researchers continue the conversations that Bentley carried on through his own scholarship, teaching, editing of the Journal of World History, participating in public forums, and contributing to public discussions about the place of history in understanding today’s global integration. The stakes involved in asking questions about the shared history of humankind continue to increase in the current era of intensified globalization. It is incumbent upon scholars with the skills to work across linguistic, geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to show the ways that cross-cultural encounters happened historically, and to point out how such interactions play out in the institutions, classrooms, and public debates where historical interpretations are created and shared.

Laura J. Mitchell

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