A Brief History of the World

I've been enjoying another great audio course from The Teaching Company called A Brief History of the World by Professor Peter N. Stearns of George Mason University. This has been another great departure from my perpetual enjoyment of Mediterranean history, into the academic specialty known as world history. It seems there is a movement among many academics away from the Western view of history towards an all-encompassing world view of the development of human civilization.

I suppose this is the type of controversy that historians fight over at cocktail parties (assuming historians go to cocktail parties).

For centuries we have been taught that the only cultures that really matter began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, with their influence gradually moving westwards through Greece, Rome, and Western Europe before arriving in the United States. World historians, on the other hand, while not ignoring the importance of Western development, pay equal homage to historical developments in India, China, Southest Asia, Japan, Russia, Northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas.

Historical politics aside, I'm just enjoying the macro view of historic achievement. I never really thought, for example of how so much happened around the close of the 15th century (what world historians call the close of the post-classical period) across many parts of the world: Mongol domination faded across the Middle East and Asia, The Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Ming Dynasty in China began to withdraw from world exploration and trade while fortifying the Great Wall, the Americas were discovered by Spanish Conquistadors, and the Italian Renaissance really began humming across Europe.

Now that's enough news to get Anderson Cooper out of the path of a Level 5 hurricane!

BW