World History (world + history)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


The Christian Religion in Modern European and World History: A Review of The Cambridge History of Christianity, 1815,2000

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2008
David Lindenfeld
Volumes 8 and 9 of the Cambridge History, representing the work of 72 scholars, reflect two major recent historiographical trends: 1) the increased attention paid to religion in modern European history, and 2) the increasing importance of Christianity in as a topic in world history. While these volumes serve to summarize the work already done in the first field, with articles on a wide variety of European countries, they should significantly move the second field forward by bringing together the work of specialists on many different parts of the world in a single place. Volume 8 summarizes scholarship on the Western religious revivals of the nineteenth century, both Catholic and Protestant. By integrating religion and politics, it also presents a more complex picture of the formation of European national identities than Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities suggests. One third of the volume is devoted to the spread of Christianity to the non-Western world. In Volume 9, the European and world history perspectives are more evenly interspersed. Major themes include the papacy, ecumenism, colonialism, Pentecostalism, and the independent churches of Africa and Asia. The 1960s emerge as a turning point, if for different reasons in different parts of the world. This was the decisive period of secularization in Europe, and the final section documents the social and cultural impact of that shift, particularly on the arts. Although there are inevitable gaps in coverage, these volumes will serve as an invaluable research tool for years to come. [source]


Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past1

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2004
Rainer F. Buschmann
This article presents various ocean- and sea-centered approaches to world history. Utilizing European transoceanic empires as a point of departure, the paper scrutinizes the emergence of "aquacentric" notions among selected global societies. The diasporas of African, Greek, and Polynesian peoples offer important pointers to unravel the global past. These pointers provide novel perspectives on the histories of the Atlantic, Indian, and the Pacific oceans. The article concludes with teaching and theoretical suggestions that derive from such aquacentric systems. [source]


Migration in World History , By Patrick Manning

THE HISTORIAN, Issue 2 2007
Rita J. Simon
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


The Origins of World History: Arnold Toynbee before the First World War

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2004
Gordon Martel
Arnold Toynbee's ambitious work A Study of History was a phenomenal publishing success in its day, but it came under severe criticism from academic historians. In recent years, there has been something of a Toynbee revival among the proponents of the growing discipline of world history. This article suggests that Toynbee makes a somewhat unlikely founding figure for the broadly liberal and cosmopolitan world history movement, and investigates the very particular origins of Toynbee's vision of world history in the intellectual world of the pre-1914 British Empire, and especially in Toynbee's education at Winchester and Oxford. [source]


The State in World History: Perspectives and Problems

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2002
Gregory Melleuish
This paper investigates the role of the state in world history and analyses some of the major issues confronting such an investigation with a particular focus on the relationship between the modern European state and the other historical forms of the state. Firstly it considers the problems raised by the fact that the terminology of state analysis is derived from a discourse that arose to explain the particularity of European state development. Secondly it considers the problem of the origins of the state. It examines two major issues: van Creveld's argument that only modern European states are real states and the chiefdom/state distinction. It argues that new political forms occurred both with the emergence of civilisation and the "state" in the ancient world and with the development of the modern European state after 1300. Thirdly it considers the issue of a typology of states through an examination of the model developed by Finer in his The History of Government. It argues that this model is only really effective in dealing with pre,modern political forms and that the modern European state needs to be understood as a deviant from the Eurasian norm of the agrarian empire. [source]


Dr Harold Frederick Shipman: An enigma

CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR AND MENTAL HEALTH, Issue 3 2010
John Gunn
Dr. Shipman was the worst known serial killer in British history, at least in terms of numbers of victims, and possibly the worst in world history, if politicians are excluded. He killed at least 215 patients and may have begun his murderous career at the age of 25, within a year of finishing his medical training. His case has had a profound impact on the practice of medicine in the United Kingdom. Was he a special case? What were the origins of this behaviour? Could the behaviour have been prevented? It is necessary to learn what we can from a few personal facts and largely circumstantial evidence. He withheld himself from any useful clinical investigation or treatment once he had been taken into custody. Could he have been treated at any stage? Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Bread, Cheese and Genocide: Imagining the Destruction of Peoples in Medieval Western Europe

HISTORY, Issue 307 2007
LEN SCALES
Western European society in the middle ages is generally perceived as lying, in its modes of thought and action, far remote from those acts of mass ethnic destruction which have been a recurrent element in world history since the early twentieth century. Yet medieval Europeans too were capable of envisaging the violent obliteration of peoples. Indeed, the view that such acts had occurred in times past and were liable to occur again was deeply embedded in medieval thought and assumption. For some commentators, the destruction of certain peoples was inseparable from the making of others, an essential motor of historical change, underpinned by biblical narratives of divine election and condemnation. Such notions constituted a matrix within which medieval writers interpreted real acts of social and political violence, the scale and the ethnic foundations of which they were thus naturally inclined to inflate. Nevertheless, their belief in the recurrent historical reality of ethnic destruction was, in their own terms, well founded , although medieval conceptions of what constituted the undoing of peoples were broader than most modern definitions of ,genocide'. By the later middle ages, moreover, government was increasingly perceived , not without justification , as a powerful agent for remaking the ethnic map. [source]


The Christian Religion in Modern European and World History: A Review of The Cambridge History of Christianity, 1815,2000

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2008
David Lindenfeld
Volumes 8 and 9 of the Cambridge History, representing the work of 72 scholars, reflect two major recent historiographical trends: 1) the increased attention paid to religion in modern European history, and 2) the increasing importance of Christianity in as a topic in world history. While these volumes serve to summarize the work already done in the first field, with articles on a wide variety of European countries, they should significantly move the second field forward by bringing together the work of specialists on many different parts of the world in a single place. Volume 8 summarizes scholarship on the Western religious revivals of the nineteenth century, both Catholic and Protestant. By integrating religion and politics, it also presents a more complex picture of the formation of European national identities than Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities suggests. One third of the volume is devoted to the spread of Christianity to the non-Western world. In Volume 9, the European and world history perspectives are more evenly interspersed. Major themes include the papacy, ecumenism, colonialism, Pentecostalism, and the independent churches of Africa and Asia. The 1960s emerge as a turning point, if for different reasons in different parts of the world. This was the decisive period of secularization in Europe, and the final section documents the social and cultural impact of that shift, particularly on the arts. Although there are inevitable gaps in coverage, these volumes will serve as an invaluable research tool for years to come. [source]


Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past1

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2004
Rainer F. Buschmann
This article presents various ocean- and sea-centered approaches to world history. Utilizing European transoceanic empires as a point of departure, the paper scrutinizes the emergence of "aquacentric" notions among selected global societies. The diasporas of African, Greek, and Polynesian peoples offer important pointers to unravel the global past. These pointers provide novel perspectives on the histories of the Atlantic, Indian, and the Pacific oceans. The article concludes with teaching and theoretical suggestions that derive from such aquacentric systems. [source]


Serving God and Country?

JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 4 2009
Military Service Among Young Adult Men, Religious Involvement
Despite important connections between religion and military action throughout world history, scholars have seldom explored the association between religiosity and military enlistment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we used a person-oriented analysis to categorize young men according to patterns of adolescent religious involvement. Youth indentified as "highly religious evangelical" are more likely to enlist in the military compared to their "highly religious nonevangelical" and "nonreligious" counterparts; however, these findings hold only for those young men without college experience. These findings are discussed along with study limitations and promising directions for future research. [source]


Socratic Political Philosophy in Xenophon's,Symposium

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2010
Thomas L. Pangle
This interpretative commentary recovers the largely overlooked significance of a work that illuminates, by portraying in a subtle comic drama, the new perspective on existence, the new way of life, that Socrates introduced in and through his founding of political philosophy. The famous "problem of Socrates" as a turning point of world history (Nietzsche) remains a cynosure of controversy and puzzlement. How did Socrates understand the character of, and the relation between, civic virtue and his own philosophic virtue? What is the meaning of Socratic "eros"? What kind of educative influence did Socrates intend to have, on and through his varied followers and associates? And what diverse effects did he actually have? Xenophon's,Symposium,,viewed in the context of his other writings, affords a playful, but thereby deeply revealing, perspective,from the viewpoint of a slightly skeptical intimate. [source]


China's Recovery: Why the Writing Was Always on the Wall

THE POLITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2009
OLIVER TURNER
China has been a major power for far longer than is typically acknowledged in the West. This paper seeks to redress established discourse of China as a ,rising' power which now enjoys common usage within Western policy-making, academic and popular circles, particularly within the United States; China can more accurately be conceived of as a ,recovering power'. A tendency by successive Washington administrations to view the world in realist terms has forced the label of ,rising' power onto China along with the negative connotations that inevitably follow. We should acknowledge the folly in utilising a theoretical approach largely devoid of any appreciation for the social and human dimensions of international relations as well as the importance of social discourse in the field. Finally, policy-makers in Washington must reconsider their realist stance and, with a fuller appreciation of world history, recognise that American hegemony was always destined to be short-lived. [source]


South Africa, the world and AIDS (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2010
Keith Hart
South Africa has been at the centre of world history for over a century and it is now the focus of all eyes for the World Cup. The country has been a by-word for racial inequality and more recently for crime and violence. But it is also notable for social progress and cultural vitality. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has claimed more victims there than anywhere else, a tragic sequel to apartheid. Successive political leaders highlight the contradictions of this historical moment in poignant, even Shakespearean ways. The author briefly reviews three books by anthropologists on AIDS there and suggests that South Africa is likely to remain a source of innovation for the discipline. But we need to take a broader view of world history than at present. [source]


The Origins of World History: Arnold Toynbee before the First World War

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2004
Gordon Martel
Arnold Toynbee's ambitious work A Study of History was a phenomenal publishing success in its day, but it came under severe criticism from academic historians. In recent years, there has been something of a Toynbee revival among the proponents of the growing discipline of world history. This article suggests that Toynbee makes a somewhat unlikely founding figure for the broadly liberal and cosmopolitan world history movement, and investigates the very particular origins of Toynbee's vision of world history in the intellectual world of the pre-1914 British Empire, and especially in Toynbee's education at Winchester and Oxford. [source]


The State in World History: Perspectives and Problems

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2002
Gregory Melleuish
This paper investigates the role of the state in world history and analyses some of the major issues confronting such an investigation with a particular focus on the relationship between the modern European state and the other historical forms of the state. Firstly it considers the problems raised by the fact that the terminology of state analysis is derived from a discourse that arose to explain the particularity of European state development. Secondly it considers the problem of the origins of the state. It examines two major issues: van Creveld's argument that only modern European states are real states and the chiefdom/state distinction. It argues that new political forms occurred both with the emergence of civilisation and the "state" in the ancient world and with the development of the modern European state after 1300. Thirdly it considers the issue of a typology of states through an examination of the model developed by Finer in his The History of Government. It argues that this model is only really effective in dealing with pre,modern political forms and that the modern European state needs to be understood as a deviant from the Eurasian norm of the agrarian empire. [source]


When half of the population died: the epidemic of hemorrhagic fevers of 1576 in Mexico

FEMS MICROBIOLOGY LETTERS, Issue 1 2004
Rodofo Acuna-Soto
Abstract During the 16th century, Mexico suffered a demographic catastrophe with few parallels in world's history. In 1519, the year of the arrival of the Spaniards, the population in Mexico was estimated to be between 15 and 30 million inhabitants. Eighty-one years later, in 1600, only two million remained. Epidemics (smallpox, measles, mumps), together with war, and famine have been considered to be the main causes of this enormous population loss. However, re-evaluation of historical data suggests that approximately 60,70% of the death toll was caused by a series of epidemics of hemorrhagic fevers of unknown origin. In order to estimate the impact of the 1576 epidemic of hemorrhagic fevers on the population we analyzed the historical record and data from the 1570 and 1580 censuses of 157 districts. The results identified several remarkable aspects of this epidemic: First, overall, the population loss for these 157 districts was 51.36%. Second, there was a clear ethnic preference of the disease, the Spanish population was minimally affected whereas native population had high mortality rate. Third, the outbreak originated in the valleys of central Mexico whence it evolved as an expansive wave. Fourth, a positive correlation between altitude and mortality in central Mexico was found. Fifth, a specific climatic sequence of events was associated with the initiation and dissemination of the hemorrhagic fevers. Although the last epidemic of hemorrhagic fevers in Mexico ended in 1815, many questions remain to be answered. Perhaps the most relevant ones are whether there is a possible reemergence of the hemorrhagic fevers and how vulnerable we are to the disease. [source]