preview

World History: 19th And Early 20th Century

Decent Essays

On World History John Sneddon History 401 Neal Cates September 16, 2015 On New World History In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the academic social sciences were divided into specializations. Historians covered Europe, the Mediterranean, and European expansion; the areas of China and Japan, as well as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia were the filed of study for orientalists; anthropologists covered the topics of contemporary people of Africa, the Americas, and South East Asia and Oceana; and the rest of the world fell into the laps of sociologists or economists . Historians largely focused on single societies1. They mostly looked at the building of nation-states, commercial economy, industrialization, and imperialism1. …show more content…

The vastness of the subject creates obstacles for the teacher or professor. How is a subject with the scope as large as the entire world, and the entire time of human existence, supposed to be broken down into a single survey course taught over a year, or even worse, a semester. One solution to this problem is trying to divide the subject into segments that students are able to grab. Peter Sterns, Ross Dunn and Deborah Smith Johnston all have different ideas on how this vast subject should be divided. Peter Sterns is a proponent of dividing world history into segments by means of periodization. Sterns notes that periodization on a scale as large as world history is a difficult task . He argues that in order for periodization to be useful in a subject as vast as world history, it must meet a specific set of criteria. The Periodization must be general rather than specific, take into account the personal as well as elite activities, look at causation, include events that occur within rather than across civilizations, and must be “strikingly original in the turning points …show more content…

Instead of the models of Dunn, Smith Johnston breaks the vast discipline of world history into three frameworks including temporal, special, and thematic in order to give students a way to grasp the vastness of the subject. Smith Johnston also emphasizes historical thinking skills, which she sees as the most important part of learning history2. After reading about both Dunn’s Patterns of Change model and Smith Johnston’s three frameworks, I would like to combine the two in my teaching career. Using Dunn’s culturally inclusive model combined with Smith Johnston’s frameworks I feel like students could get the culturally inclusivity in a package that is easy to comprehend. I like the idea of breaking world history into themes, however they need to be expressed in historical context. There needs to be information given as to time frames within the themes, otherwise students will have a no concept of when events

Get Access