1: Introduction
- Page ID
- 147157
New Perspectives on World History
Welcome to our textbook. This is a collaborative project involving many authors bringing their perspectives and approaches to their chapters but with a common goal of presenting you with a different type of history than you are used to encountering. We will do this by looking at the history of the modern world through the lens of anti-racism, equity, and social justice. These are important concepts but ones that are vulnerable to becoming mere buzzwords spouted by overmatched corporate middle managers. To keep that from happening here, this chapter will examine those concepts and describe what a history that engages with anti-racism, equity, and social justice should look like. Before getting to that it is important to first establish some of the ways that historical narratives have been used, in ways large and small, to support the existing power relations in our society. However, it does not have to be that way and we can make choices to produce a better kind of history. To end, we will offer some suggestions for a better way forward for teaching, writing, and thinking about our collective human past. Lastly, it is worth noting that the work we are doing here does not represent an endpoint, but a start of a complex process of reckoning that history as a discipline must undergo. Whether we do so quickly or more slowly, it is imperative that we move forward towards a goal of a history that is truly anti-racist, equitable, and based on ideals of social justice.
- 1.1: History Involves Choices
- We need to acknowledge that history is not simply an account of “what happened” further questions become necessary: who determined that this was the version of the narrative that should be told? Why are we focusing on this group of people and not another? Why is the narrative being told as a triumph when it seems to be a tragedy from another perspective? Historical narratives are not neutral or objective, in other words.
- 1.2: Anti-Racism, Equity, and History
- Explicit racism is very rare in contemporary scholarship. Yet, there are many ways in which 19th and 20th-century racial assumptions still pervade the popular understanding of history. Just as one example, we can think of the way that notions of freedom and liberty so often get discussed as Enlightenment concepts developed by white political thinkers in Europe and the Americas.
- 1.3: History and Social Justice
- Historians do not have to pretend to be neutral observers standing above the fray. Instead, our work can help identify the things about our world that aren't right and encourage some of the change that needs to happen. The practice of history can serve the interests of social justice.
- 1.4: History and Power
- Historians have too often provided cover for the system and to make up for that we must now do our part to reveal the process by which history is constructed. History is too often the fruit of power.
- 1.5: A Better Way
- The fact is that so much of our knowledge is tied up in imperialist projects of representation. We cannot fully disentangle our knowledge from its source, but we should always strive to be aware of the roots of our knowledge and the origins of our terminology so we do not end up reproducing the old imperialist power relations in our discussions of the past. If we are to produce a better history, one that lives up to the promise of this textbook, then we must do our best to keep the voice of resi
Thumbnail: "Global Connections," in the Public Domain.