Writing History in the Global Era

by Lynn Hunt

Overview

Leading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written.

Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as they share their ideas. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of individuals’ active role and their place in society as the keys to understanding the way people and ideas interact. Hunt also reveals how surprising new perspectives on society and the self offer promising new ways of thinking about the meaning and purpose of history in our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393245776
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/08/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	489 KB

About the Author

Lynn Hunt is Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, former president of the American Historical Association, and author of numerous works, including Inventing Human Rights and Telling the Truth about History. She lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: History's Changing Fortunes 1

1 The Rise and Fall of Cultural Theories 13

2 The challenge of Globalization 44

3 Rethinking Society and the Self 78

4 New Purposes, New Paradigms 119

Notes 153

Index 183

Editorial Reviews

No one has a better nose for historical trends than Lynn Hunt. Her short, sharp book offers an inspiring declaration of interdependence for historians—to understand the global present collaboratively, using all our tools to unscramble the entangled past.

David Armitage

With characteristic concision and lucidity, Lynn Hunt takes on the methodological dilemmas facing all historians today…A thought-provoking snapshot of where historians stand now and where they might be headed. Lively and engaging, this book will help both budding and seasoned historians understand the current state of their discipline.

Sarah Maza

Hunt’s compact book should serve as the first port of call for students and general readers interested in how historians have interpreted and reinterpreted the emergence of the world around them.

Brendan Simms - Wall Street Journal

Hunt has…the most reliable eye for new trends in the American historical profession, and what she considers important always amounts to more than the sum of her current enthusiasms…she has a preternatural sense of the new new thing being touted by historians to study old things.

Samuel Moyn - The Nation

2014-06-19
A noted historian offers a lucid overview of her changing field.“History is always under construction,” writes Hunt (History/UCLA;Inventing Human Rights,2007, etc.) in this study of the current state of historical writing. In the 19th and early 20thcenturies, histories served the purpose of reinforcing national identity, telling a story meant to provide disparate ethnic groups, classes and regions with a common sense of their country’s past. By midcentury, however, new perspectives emerged, influencing research and writing: Marxism, which focused on class struggles; modernization, which investigated the transmission of knowledge and the conflict “between modernizing forces and traditional groups who are left behind”; the French Annales school, which examined society, social groups and economies; and identity politics, which looked particularly at women, minorities and immigrant groups. These four paradigms, the author argues, were undermined by cultural theories emerging from the 1960s to 1990s: Race studies, queer studies, gender studies and post-colonial studies served as critiques, insisting that “race, gender, and class could not be viewed as stable categories determined by biology, demography, or economics” but rather were “shaped by unstable systems of interrelationship created by shifting cultural values.” Beginning in the ’90s, many historians developed a new interest in transnational and global history, posing a challenge to redefine the boundaries of society. Historians thinking globally widen their scopes to consider the relationship of humans to the natural world, individuals’ psychology and the connection between biology and culture. Hunt offers some startling examples of global interactions—e.g., the desperate demand for Chinese rhubarb, used as a purgative in 17th-century Europe, which affected travel, economics and the transmission of medical knowledge from China to Europe. When tea drinking became a popular leisure time activity, it inspired importation of special cups, saucers and teapots and influenced the creation of meals as “important domestic activities” signaling refinement.In this incisive look at the history of history, Hunt asserts that globalization will inspire a new paradigm acknowledging the importance—and inevitably—of cross-disciplinary and collaborative inquiry.

Kirkus Reviews