CHANGING HISTORY'S CHANNELS
THE WORLD HISTORY CENTER REDIRECTS THE DISCIPLINE.
By Patrick Manning
World history has arrived. In earlier generations,
historians concentrated on the story of one country at a time. The history
of the whole world was a side issue. "World history" meant a
casual reference to a few empires or major wars and some general statements
about progress. The few scholars who wrote books on world history met rejection
from colleagues who saw them as religious or philosophical ideologues,
generalizing at too vast a scale.
Now, at the millennium, world history is central
in schooling and research. In courses at most high schools and many colleges,
students are actually required to learn something of the whole world over
thousands of years. Meanwhile scholars seek answers on global change in
the economy, environment, and culture.
But what does "world history" really
mean? It is the study of large-scale processes in the past, and of their
connections to local and national events. Let me suggest three of many
reasons for this new interest. Among teachers, a desire has arisen to make
history seem relevant to students of every background in their increasingly
multicultural classes. Among scholars trained in the area-studies programs
built up in the 1950s (focusing on Africa, Asia, and other regions), the
success of their work has led to curiosity about
connections among world regions. Most fundamentally, the acceleration of
social and environmental conflicts and the rise of global policy problems
have pointed to a need to understand the connections among nations in past
and present.
Research in world history has not developed enough,
however, to meet these needs. Neither has the preparation of teachers.
For teachers skilled in American or European history, it is no easy task
to convey a thousand years of the expansion of Islam or two hundred years
of global connections in industry. Among scholars seeking answers to global
questions, few have training or experience in linking events across continents.
Until a few years ago, there existed no major
center for global historical research, graduate training, curriculum development,
or teacher preparation. World historians needed a center for global studies
equivalent to the centers for area studies created (with large-scale federal
assistance) after World War II.
Northeastern's historians,
already active in world history research, had the foresight to step forward
in 1990 and propose a doctoral program in world history. My colleagues,
by making and sticking with this unique decision, brought the department
to its current national and international prominence. N.U. inaugurated
its world history do`ctoral program and its World History Center in 1994.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Within a year of opening, the center had two major
grants under its belt and the department had admitted five fine doctoral
students. As of this writing, the center has won ten grants and contracts
totaling over a million dollars from federal, state, and private sources.
The Northeastern group is now the largest group of world historians anywhere:
fifteen faculty members (including Thomas Havens, our new departmental
chair), fifteen doctoral students, and as many students in our master's
(MA) and Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) programs.
Northeastern is the leading center for conducting
and presenting research in world history. Faculty research ranges widely:
my own research includes the impact of the slave trade on African population,
recent democratization movements, and a review of the literature in world
history. Other individual projects include migration from China, migration
from the Caribbean, and the transfer of police technologies around the
world. In addition, we have launched a major collaborative project on world
history since 1700, collecting global data on the economy, migration, and
roles of men and women in society.
Northeastern's doctoral dissertations, wide-ranging
but solidly based, show the directions of research in world history. Two
focus on international comparisons: one on black women in bus boycotts
in the U.S. and South Africa, and one on the "new man" of communist
regimes in China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. Four other dissertations
focus on large historical processes: international migration, management
of public opinion in industrial and developing countries, decolonization
(the independence of European colonies after 1945), and communalism (religious
identity as a basis for political action). A third category includes views
of the world through individuals and small groups: a family of writers
in eighteenth-century Braintree, Massachusetts; a leading historian of
east Asia; a French-Canadian parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts; and a World
War I British general. One further dissertation will create thematic courses
on world history at college and high school levels.
The program's first PhD went in June 1999 to Sarah
Swedberg. She has begun a tenure-track position at Mesa State College in
Colorado. Of the four candidates expected to complete their degrees in
2000, one holds a Fulbright grant for study in Latvia and another recently
published two books.
The World History Center is the country's liveliest
site for world history teacher preparation and teaching materials. With
a major grant from the Annenberg/CPB Project, we first put the center's
energies into "Migration in Modern World History," a CD-ROM course
to appear in late 1999. It includes an elegant interface, four hundred
documents, thirteen interpretive units, an innovative analytical pedagogy
with 1,001 questions, and tools enabling students to write their own multimedia
essays. It will debut at a campus conference this fall.
The World History Resource Center, another unique
dimension of the Northeastern program, opened its doors in summer 1998.
This fine collection of college and high school teaching materials has
served as the basis of an ambitious program of outreach to teachers. In
the last year alone, some three hundred teachers from Massachusetts and
New England attended our six workshops. Grants from the Massachusetts Department
of Education, the Boston Public Schools, and the Boston Annenberg Challenge
funded much of this work.
N.U. students in our MA and MAT programs have
relied on their world-history training to gain excellent teaching placements.
This work has brought us national recognition and a new responsibility:
the College Board, in preparing to train teachers for its new Advanced
Placement World History Course (a college course for high school students
expected to attract 15,000 students in 2001), has called on the center
to run a national workshop at Northeastern for forty top teachers in July
2000.
The World History Center has contributed greatly
to creating institutions for the new field of world history. The center
itself and N.U.'s doctoral program are the first such institutions. In
addition, we have created the World History Resource Center; the World
History Seminar, with biweekly research presentations; a Web site (www.whc.neu.edu);
H-WORLD, the Internet discussion list on world
history, with 1,300 subscribers worldwide; and more.
Our next step is hosting a worldwide convention.
Over four hundred participants will gather at Northeastern June 2227,
2000, for the Ninth International Conference of the World History Association,
an organization of 1,500 professors and teachers founded in 1982. One section
of the conference will focus on "World History as a Research Field,"
while another will emphasize "Teaching Environmental World History."
The scholars and teachers who meet in Boston will share the discoveries
in global connections that are changing the interpretation of history.
Our World History Center is far from the center
of the universe, but we've built a pretty good observatory from which to
view the global past. Our instruments are our documents, our methods, and
our focus on global interactions in history, used in collaboration with
colleagues in the U.S. and abroad. Through these instruments we can magnify
our observations of the global past. I hope that historians and the public
will find our results as exciting as we do and will express interest in
expanding, improving, and funding the observatory.
Patrick Manning,
professor of history and African-American studies, is director of the
World History Center.
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