This exclusive series covers key subject areas from a global perspective to support students new to the field, and provide instructors with useful resources that they can utilize to globalize and expand their curriculum. Each article offers a comparative overview of important topics, outlining the key events, figures, scholarship, and areas of debate, alongside a thorough bibliography of key reading to support further studies.
Alessandra Cecolin
“Historiography is the science of writing history. It includes the evolution of different schools of thought and techniques used to interpret different historical events and the changing nature of history.” This article look at some of the approaches to history over time.
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Susan Kingsley Kent
“Since the 1970s, historians have engaged in an often rancorous debate over what gender history should look like and how to do it. As is not always the case in what appears to be arcane academic arguments, the intensity of our debates has yielded easily as much light as heat, and practitioners of this craft can be proud of what we have wrought.”
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Daniel Gorman
“Global history takes as its subject the history of the global human experience. Global historians are interested in studying the interconnections and interrelationships between people and places on a global scale. Global history can mean the study of truly planetary subjects, such as climate change, but usually connotes the study of global integration.”
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Sarah Ifft Decker
“Increasingly, scholars have acknowledged that gender has a history: different cultures and societies have constructed roles and power structures linked to perceptions of biological sex in a variety of ways. In the Medieval world, a person’s perceived gender determined their legal status, their work, their religious obligations, their position within family structures, and the expectations other people had about their behavior.”
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Danielle E. A. Park
“It is important to recognize that Crusading was a distinctly Western Christian phenomenon, one that both reflected and impacted upon the western European world view of the borders of Christendom and the necessity of their expansion. This poses challenges to achieving a truly global view…”
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Luisa Nardini
“Given the impossibility of summarizing the wealth of publications on global early music and since any attempts at global musicology are inherently provisional and aspirational—coverage is a chimera—this essay is primarily methodological and pedagogical and, while offering a list of possible case-studies, offers some points for reflection to instructors and researchers.”
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Sara Ann Knutson
“Global Medieval studies is a transdisciplinary field that pursues the Medieval period’s wider, global connectivities, exchanges, and articulations. The significance of this expansive scope is not only a matter of reexamining the Middle Ages with more inclusionary perspectives from the past. Researchers have also begun to recognize more inclusionary perspectives in the present…”
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Helen J. Nicholson
“The Knights Templar, often known simply as “Templars,” were a military-religious organization founded in Jerusalem in around 1120 to protect Christian pilgrims traveling from Europe to the Christian holy places in Palestine. Members took monastic vows of personal poverty, chastity, and obedience to their superior.”
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Amanda Power
“Environmental history is an important tool for unsettling assumptions… and restoring visibility, importance, even agency, to other planetary actors. This demands sophisticated approaches that recognize previously overlooked constraints and contexts for human histories but avoid the dangers of environmental determinism.”
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Natalie M. Van Deusen
“In both Iceland and Norway, the advent of writing in the vernacular using the Latin alphabet is tied to the arrival of Christianity, which introduced and trained new clerics in both the Latin alphabet and the various tools and technologies available for writing.”
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Kenneth L. Campbell
“The study of the philosophy of history is best achieved through reading original sources by those thinkers who have developed philosophies of history that have proven influential and enduring, or shifted the paradigm on the subject in a significant way. Interest in the philosophy of history among scholars has increased in recent years after a period of neglect…”
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“Public history has been considered a practical, active, and proactive process of creating, delivering, and representing history for the consumption of everyone... Within this process public history considers the way history is and can be created, interpreted, and communicated, regarding public involvement as pivotal in the process of making sense and meaning of the past in the present.”
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Geraldine Heng
“For a long time, race in the European Middle Ages was a difficult subject to treat. This was because for generations, the modernists who dominated race scholarship in the academy tended to dismiss any possibility that race and its attendant consequences had any meaning at all for premodern eras.”
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