Synopses & Reviews
Thinking History Globally means thinking about the past and the present beyond national borders, language barriers, and enclosed regions. There are four thinking strategies to gain global perspectives: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing. Comparing is about contrasting between several cases and drawing new conclusions. Connecting is tracking the interdependences between cases and assessing their importance. Conceptualizing is recognizing that developments in one or several cases belong within a larger recurring pattern. Contextualizing is making sense of one case amidst developments world-wide. This book offers a practical guide into these strategies of thinking by applying them to multiple historical cases, ranging from the first civilizations and up to the First World War. While doing that, Olstein also presents the twelve branches of history that outstand in the application of these four strategies and in thinking history globally: comparative, relational, international, transnational, oceanic, global, world, and big histories, historical sociology, civilizational analysis, world-system approach, and history of globalization.
Synopsis
The book brings together many recent trends in writing history under a common framework: thinking history globally. By thinking history globally, the book explains, applies, and exemplifies the four basic strategies of analysis, the big C's: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing, using twelve different branches of history.
About the Author
Diego Olstein is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Associate Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He has published widely on Medieval Spain, World History, and historiography, and has taught and lectured on these subjects in Argentina, Israel, Europe, the US, Australia, and China.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Theory in Practice
2. Twelve Branches in their Singularities, Overlaps, and Clusters
3.Comparing or Connecting
4.Comparing and Connecting
5.Varieties of Connections
6.Conceptualizing through Social Sciences
7.Thinking Globalization Historically
8. Contextualizing in Bigger Scales
9.All Together Now, a Last Rehearsal: Thinking Globally on Border Crossing Phenomena, the First World War
Analytical Bibliography