The World History Association

From WHA President Laura Mitchell: The World HIstory Association launched a blog today: Pandem-mondus. World historians make sense of #pandemic, + teaching & research tips for a #ChangedPlanet Take that #coronavirus #EverythingHasAHistory #WeHaveEachOther #PandemicPedagogy AP World History Teachers World History Association Teachers

Great news that the World History Commons Beta is now live! The WHA has been active in collaborating in this project, with many in WHA active in the creation of it and on the advisory board. Please explore and provide feedback.

SSEC welcomes paper proposals for its 2020 Conference in Kyiv, Ukraine (June 16-21). Complete info available at http://ssec-inc.org. Please RT

Something to share, on Achebe's Birthday!

The World History Association (WHA) will hold its 29th Annual Conference, UTAH 2020, from June 25 – 27, 2020. The conference theme will be "Sustainability & Preservation: Local + Regional + Global," although submissions on other historical themes are also welcome. We will be located in the Foothills District of Salt Lake City, where multiple cultural attractions, museums and the University of Utah converge. This location, in the valley of the Wasatch Mountains, affords registrants outdoor recreational options and beautiful views. At this time, the Call for Papers (CFPs) is open and submissions due by December 16, 2019. General information about the CFPs and the submission forms can be found on the WHA Homepage (www.thewha.org).

yes please let us know about the upcoming conference

The WHA Annual conference in Puerto Rico is about to start tomorrow! A few members gathered to catch up over a meal tonight.

Hello! A study abroad program for high school students is currently accepting applications for a number of teaching positions in Europe this summer. We are looking for inspirational and experienced instructors to teach a wide variety of academic disciplines, from foreign languages to history, from international relations to business and marketing. Currently we have openings for Modern Europe and Western Civ. The programs take place in the month of July in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, and the United States. Room, board, transportation and salary are provided.” For more information, please refer to https://www.goabbeyroad.com/summer-teaching-jobs-abroad/ If this post is not allowed please remove it, and I apologize. Thank you!

I just wanted to share this opportunity. For teachers in the following countries: Greece, Britain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey -- In August there will be a conference for educators about the teaching the Korean War. The Conference, hosted by the Korean War Legacy Foundation and funded by the Korea Foundation, will be in Athens, Greece and most expenses are covered (hotel, meals, and a travel allowance are provided). If you currently teach in one of these countries, please go to this site to learn additional information. This program is not open to teachers teaching in the US (they already sponsor many programs for US teachers in the states).

University or community college faculty (full-time or adjunct): Consider applying to this FUNDED National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on Middle Eastern Millennials. One catch: The application is due THIS Friday, March 1 (but the application is not too hard)! Apply now!

Apply for the Bridget Jones Award BRIDGET JONES TRAVEL AWARD 2019 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS Arts researchers or practitioners living and working in the Caribbean are eligible to apply for the Bridget Jones Travel Award, the deadline for which is the 18th January 2019. The winner of the award will present their work at the 43rd Annual Conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies, The Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, July 3-5, 2019. Eligibility If you are an arts practitioner living and working in any region of the Anglophone, Hispanic, Francophone or Dutch speaking Caribbean, you may apply for the Award. The successful recipient will receive £650 towards travel expenses and, in addition, a full bursary to cover conference fees and accommodation. Applications are especially welcome from individuals with no institutional affiliations. We encourage applications from across the arts: from visual artists, performers, creative writers, film-makers, folklorists, playwrights etc. How to Apply To apply for the Award you must submit the following: * A covering letter * Curriculum vitae (no more than 4 sides of A4) * Statements from 2 referees who are able to comment on your work AND either (a) A proposal for a presentation of your work in the areas of film, literature, visual or performing arts. Or (b) A proposal for a reading of original creative work. Presentations normally last for up to one hour, including time for questions from the audience. The most important part of your application will therefore be a 1) full description of the proposed presentation detailing the themes and rationale behind the presentation, as well as 2) how the presentation will be organized and 3) any props required (e.g. if intending to screen clips of films; show slides of artwork; incorporate live performance etc.). The successful candidate would be expected to attend the whole conference. Applications and enquiries should be sent by e-mail to Audley Chambers at [email protected] Completed applications must be received by 18th January 2019. A decision will be made by the committee in early February. For more information on the Bridget Jones Travel Award and the Society for Caribbean Studies, visit the Society website on

In connection with the current controversy over the shape of AP world history, I shared this fairly long list of world-historical questions on the AP World History teachers' page. For what it's worth to WHA members, I'm posting it here. The division of the questions into six periods follows the APWH periodization scheme. Sample “Big Questions” for AP World History Courses (September 18, 2018 Version) Ross Dunn (San Diego State University retired) has adapted and compiled this sample of historical questions of relatively large scale following a three-day middle school and high school world history workshop (October-November 2017) codirected by Avi Black and sponsored by the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Michelle Herczog, History-Social Studies Consultant. The questions are of varying scale in terms of time, space, and subject matter, ranging from “really big” to moderately big. They are categorized by AP World History’s six chronological periods, but they are not correlated to specific Key Concepts. All the questions are meant to imply that students will gather evidence and test claims, though many questions will primarily test student’s reasoning skills. Please share comments on this list with me and others. Period 1: Technological and Environmental Transformations, to 600 BCE Do maps of the world or large regions, representing both past and present, almost always display distortions, preconceptions, or biases in one way or another? What are some examples of such errors? Considering that humans share 98-99 percent of their genes with chimps, bonobos, and gorillas, what physical and mental capacities do humans possess that those primates, as well as all other life forms, do not have? How did humans get to be "everywhere," but other primates have occupied approximately the same very limited habitats for as long as we know (unless taken from those habitats by people)? Why did some humans become farmers, when our species had survived without farming for 300,000 years or more? How might humans have domesticated plants without being conscious that they were doing it? How would you investigate and test the claim that women were primarily responsible for the agricultural revolution? Which way of living would likely be more desirable, foraging or farming—and why? How and why did humans, after surviving exclusively as foragers and hunters for 250,000 years or more, suddenly—within a period of about 5,000 years—begin to increase dramatically in population, form social groups numbering in the thousands, and create much more complex social, political, economic, and cultural ways of thinking and behaving? Why did the earliest large-scale agrarian (agricultural) societies develop in regions where it never rained much? How might humans have gotten “trapped” into building complex societies (civilizations) rather than deliberately doing it ? Why did complex societies develop differing social classes, like aristocrats, merchants, artisans, peasants, and slaves, when these rankings had never existed earlier? If Sargon of Akkad led the first empire in world history, what defines an empire as opposed to an ordinary monarchy or other centrally governed state? What causal relationship might have existed between the development of pastoral nomadism as a way of life and the increase in population in arid Inner Eurasia (steppe, desert, and mountain region), as well as the rise of states and even empires in that region? How would you investigate and test the claim that women generally exercised more authority and influence in pastoral nomadic societies than in agrarian societies? Why did people who spoke Indo-European languages (which include English and Spanish) spread so far in Afroeurasia, and what varying effects did they have on agrarian societies that encountered them? Did people who spoke Indic languages (a subfamily of Indo-European) invade India, and if not, why did Indic languages become so prominent in much of South Asia, eventually displacing earlier languages there? Why did Phoenicians and Greeks, both of whom came from relatively small regions of the Mediterranean basin, have so much success introducing their products and their cultural forms around the rim of that sea? How does an alphabetic writing system differ from a logographic one, and why did alphabetic systems spread widely in Afroeurasia? Considering that our species began to colonize Australia 60,000 years ago or more, why didn’t Australians adopt or invent farming at any time before the eighteenth century CE? Period 2: Organization and Reorganization of Human Societies, 600 BCE – 600 CE Did Persia’s geographical position in greater Afroeurasia contribute to its wealth and power in the era of the Achaemenid empire, and if so what factors might have been significant? Considering that human societies developed specific religious beliefs and practices only on local or relatively small regional scales for at least tens of thousands of years, why did “big religions,” that is, belief systems that encompassed much larger regions, emerge in the first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE? What did it take in particular resources, technologies, commercial connections, and government organization to build each of the several empires or strong monarchies that flourished in Afroeurasia between 300 BCE and 300 CE—notably Rome, Kush, Axum, Parthian Persia, Kushana, and Han China? How did the Romans succeed in uniting the entire Mediterranean basin under their rule, when no state has done it before or since? Did Christianity spread in spite of the social and political troubles of the third-to-fifth centuries or because of those conditions? What factors might explain why, from the paleolithic era to 600 CE, the number of languages spoken in the world multiplied into the thousands? Why did many groups that migrated in Afroeurasia between the fourth and sixth centuries CE tend to move from regions of steppe and desert to agrarian regions? Considering that most societies in Afroeurasia had access to iron tools and weapons, wheeled tools and vehicles, and several species of large domesticated animals but societies in the Americas did not, how did both North and South Americans create large urban complexes and strong states between 900 BCE and 600 CE? How would you best describe the Bantu farming groups that migrated generally southward in Africa starting in the third millennium BCE: a collection of tribes, a number of centralized and militarized states, speakers of related languages, or a culturally united people? Period 3: Regional and Interregional Interactions, 600 CE – 1500 CE Between 600 and 1500 CE, the interconnections among human societies became more widespread, more complex, and much denser. How and why did this happen, and how did this development contribute to accelerating change in other areas of life—political, social, economic, cultural, or environmental? In this era did any regions of Afroeurasia, including adjoining islands, remain entirely unconnected from neighboring or distant societies during those 900 years? If so, where were these places, and why did they remain isolated? During this period of increasing interconnectivity, did societies across Afroeurasia become more homogenized, that is, more similar to one another in terms of their social and cultural identities? Why did they, or not? How did Islam, which started as a small sect in the Arabian desert in the seventh century CE, succeed in becoming one of the “big religions” within a few hundred years? In terms of both similarities and differences in the directions they spread and why in the first 1000 years CE, how would you compare Christianity and Islam? Given that human societies have developed a number of different but useful counting methods over the millennia, what factors might explain why the system developed in South Asia in the Gupta imperial era, a system that uses a base-ten method, positional notation, and the concept of zero, spread so widely after the seventh century CE and become the foundation of modern mathematics? What important differences emerged in the way religious leaders exercised authority in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim societies, and what social or political significance did those differences have for those societies? Why in the seven centuries after 800 CE did people professing Islam dominate so many links in the trans-hemispheric trade network, and what factors might have prevented them from dominating all of it? Considering China’s extraordinary commercialization between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE, might China have launched an industrial revolution in that period? What factors might explain why that revolution did not happen? What evidence might be presented to test the claim that Japan, a cultural and technological imitator of China for many centuries, emerged as a distinctive urban society in its own right from about 1000 CE? What causal relationship might have existed between the major geographical features of Africa from the Mediterranean Sea southward to the tropical rainforest region and the rise of several large states in West Africa between 800 and 1500 CE? How did migrating groups speaking Turkic languages take power in several agrarian regions between 900 and 1200 CE, and in what ways did those newcomers differ in their political, social, and cultural impact, depending on the region? Regarding their historical significance between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, should the Mongols and their Turkic allies be regarded primarily as disrupters and destroyers of agrarian societies or as creative builders and agents of positive interaction among those societies? What historical developments might account for significant population decline in large areas of Afroeurasia in the fourteenth century CE? Considering that many peoples of both Afroeurasia and the Americas had dense agrarian societies but no significant contact with each other, how might both similarities and differences between societies in those “separate worlds” in, say, the eleventh century CE be explained in terms of political and social organization, technologies, and cultural styles? What evidence would you present to explain why agrarian societies, cities, and governments developed on a much larger scale in Mesoamerican than in Upper North America (United States and Canada) between 600 and 1500 CE? Period 4: Global Interactions, 1450 – 1750 CE Did the approximate year 1500 represent the most important turning point in world history, and how would you test claims that it did or did not? What are some of the fundamental ways in which the great world convergence—the permanent linking of all the world’s large landmasses (except Antarctica and Australia) between 1450 and 1750—contributed to accelerating change on a global or hemispheric scale in terms of population, economy, culture, and environment? Did the Little Ice Age—the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century when global temperatures significantly fell—affect some regions of the world more than others, and what kinds of historical developments or trends might be linked to that climate event? Between 1450 and 1750, the number of self-governing territories in the world declined, but some states grew in size, population, wealth, and power? Why and how did this happen, and what economic, social, or cultural consequences did this phenomenon have? In what circumstances—including the great world convergence—did religious clashes or divisions take place in between 1450 and 1759 in Europe, the central Muslim lands, and China? In what ways were these disturbances similar or different in their consequences for society? Did the Ottoman, Mughal, or Ming Chinese empire have the technology and skills to send naval and commercial ships to the Americas, and how and why did smaller, poorer European states do this instead? How would you rank the importance of causative factors to explain the downfall of the Aztec and Inca empires at the hands of small numbers of European soldiers in the sixteenth century? How would you explain and test the claim made by the historian Andre Gunder Frank that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries “money [mainly silver] went round the world and made the world go round?” Under what circumstances did the global circulation of silver and gold contribute to the wealth of some states or regions more than others? What evidence would you present to argue the claim that the Renaissance represented a turning point in significant respects for 1) humankind as a whole or 2) only for Europe? What was the ”scientific revolution,” and why did a surge of scientific invention and discovery occur at the far northwestern end of Afroeurasia (western Europe) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries? How and why did the widespread adoption of gunpowder technology significantly affect political, economic, and social patterns in both Afroeurasia and the Americas between 1450 and 1750? What factors might explain why some African groups took part in the enslavement of other Africans to supply millions of people to the European-controlled Atlantic slave trade? How would you investigate and test the claim that China under the Qing dynasty was a greater imperial power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than was any European state? Period 5: Industrialization and Global Integration, 1750 – 1900 CE After increasing at a fairly gradual pace for 10,000 years or more, why did the population of our species began to accelerate at an unprecedented rate during the eighteenth century? What major similarities and differences were there in the origins, development, and short-term consequences of revolutionary movements in the late eighteenth century in British North America, France, and Haiti, and what historical significance did particular differences have for these societies? In a world in which most central states of all sizes were monarchies, why did the 13 colonies in British North America unite to form a republic? In terms of political and social ideas, what connections might be made between the concepts of “natural rights” and of “representative government?” Considering that they founded republics based on ideas of natural rights and the sovereignty of the people, why did the United States, France, and some Latin American countries continue to allow legal slavery either at home or in colonial possessions for several decades thereafter? Were the reasons for continuing slavery the same in every case? How would you investigate and test the claim that industrialization was not something that began in England and spread to other parts of the world but that it was a world-scale development from the start? Why did human production and consumption of useful heat energy soar upward beginning in the late eighteenth century after remaining about the same for thousands of years? Was it inevitable that the industrial revolution occurred in Western Europe rather than in some other region? Were there regions in the world where an industrial revolution could not possibly have occurred? Why did industrialists in Europe and the United States promote the idea that some jobs were “naturally” suited to women and others to men? How would you explain the meaning of the term “gunpowder empire,” and how would you assess the military effectiveness and political importance of firearms in about 1800 compared to today? What were the major destinations of European migrants in the nineteenth century, and why did Europeans migrate by millions to certain parts of the world but not to others? What factors explain why more Africans than Europeans moved to the Americas in the three centuries before 1800? How would you investigate and test the claim that nationalism began in the eighteenth century as a project in a few countries to model universal republican and democratic ideals for the rest of the world but that during the nineteenth century nationalism became much more ethnically and politically exclusive, leading to greater differences, distrust, and hostility among national states? Considering that until about 1800 European states ruled extensive territories only in the Americas, in what circumstances did several European states, plus Japan and the United States, impose colonial rule, economic domination, significant cultural influence, or a combination of all three on a large part of the globe’s population between 1800 and 1914? In what several ways did Africans and Asians resist foreign conquest in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why did resistance movements finally fail in many places but that some countries succeeded in preserving their political independence, for example, Ethiopia, Iran, Thailand, and China? Period 6: Accelerating Global Change and Realignments, 1900 - present Did revolutionary movements that broke out in Russia, Iran, Ottoman Turkey, China, and Mexico between 1900 and 1911 share any particular causative factors? What might these causes have been? Why have some historians labeled World War I the first “industrialized” war? Might any earlier wars have deserved that description? Why did many citizens in Europe, Latin America, Japan, and other places become discouraged with liberal democracy after World War I, and why did people in several countries accept totalitarian governments, whether fascist, Nazi, or communist? What variable factors are significant in comparing and contrasting twentieth-century totalitarian governments with autocratic divine monarchies of the eighteenth century? What causative factors might explain why a second global war broke out just 21 years after the first one ended? Has nationalism and its promotion of nationalist ideology and identity served mainly as a positive or as a negative force in world history since 1900? In what ways did conditions of both World War I and World War II influence the success of movements for women’s voting rights? How would you investigate and test the claim that World War II resulted in the emergence of two new empires, the Soviet Union and the United States? Did the outcome of World War II make a Cold War between the US and the USSR inevitable? Why did most European colonies in Africa achieve independence in the postwar decades mainly through protest and negotiation, but a few places—Algeria, the Portuguese colonies, Zimbabwe, South Africa—gained freedom or majority rule only after long, violent struggles? Considering the great destruction and loss of life that World War II unleashed, under what circumstances did the world economy grow at a spectacular rate during the following three decades? Why did this growth benefit some countries and regions much more than others? Why did the modernization theory that many post-war scholars endorsed—the idea that if newly independent and non-industrialized states followed the liberal democratic and capitalist path of the major Western powers, those states could industrialize rapidly as well—prove to be less unconvincing in the second half of the 20th century? How might the term “world culture” be defined? How have certain cultural forms, traditions, or movements transformed themselves from local or regional to global phenomena in the past 120 years? What are some examples of world cultural expression, and what social or political significance have they had? In research during the past few decades, what distinctions do scholars commonly make between studies of women and studies of gender in the history of any period or region? What important contributions have gender studies made to historical knowledge and understanding? In 2017 there were approximately 195 sovereign states in the world. Nearly all of them have been either republics or constitutional monarchies and claimed to endorse democratic institutions. Since 1900, however, have some national states renounced democratic institutions altogether? How might we assess whether they have done this or not? How might we evaluate the adherence of a state to democratic institutions? Why have many states that in reality are authoritarian or oligarchical nevertheless represented themselves as republics or constitutional monarchies and boast of having constitutions, bills of rights, parliaments, and elections? In the past 300 years our species has flourished on the earth. Its population, urban numbers, energy use, economic growth, average standard of living, and popular participation in public life have all spiraled upward. But in the same centuries the quality of the planetary environment has deteriorated at alarming speed in several respects, and the gap between affluent and impoverished humans has widened. Given the accelerating transformations of the past 120 years, can humankind continue on a path of greater population growth, energy consumption, pollution, and global temperature increase, or must we commit to less global complexity of all kinds, lower average living standards, thinner webs of exchange, and greater reliance on local, communal bonds of identity and solidarity? What do scientists and historians mean by the term “Anthropocene,” and why is an understanding of this term and its historical significance important? Ross Edmunds Dunn [email protected]