Students in world history programs gain opportunities to expand certain basic skills– but it’s also vital wherever possible not to focus so intently on the fundamentals that there’s inadequate time for more advanced analytical components. Good world history pro- grams expect some writing and ideally some oral presentations as well. Students can anticipate expectations ranging from appropriate grammar and word choice, to logical organization to (ideally) a certain level of stylistic felicity. The key challenge is for students to become accustomed to using world history facts and data to form arguments. There’s often a certain tension here. Because world history programs do involve a certain amount of factual coverage, and because there’s a need or desire to make sure that students do the reading and don’t fall too far behind, some testing will place a premium on memorization. Students will be asked to identify key features of Confucianism or the industrial revolution – just to be sure they are competent in some of the empirical building blocks of world history. But this kind of testing should not distract from the greater goals, of developing the capacity to use knowledge of Confucianism to answer larger questions about the distinctive nature of Chinese society or the ways in which Chinese social systems in practice actually fit Confucian guidelines. Always, the intent is to combine factual accuracy with an ability to marshal empirical evidence to answer questions that go beyond regurgitation.
There is always a danger in textbook-based history courses– and world history is no exception – that diligent students will mistake careful memorization for the kind of analytical agility they need in
using facts to answer questions. (Instructors sometimes call this impulse, admittedly inelegantly, a data dump.) A student encounters a writing assignment, for example, that asks for assessment of changes and continuities in Russia’s position in the world economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and says, aha, it’s about Russia, and proceeds to list every feature of Russia, from Peter the Great to World War I, that can be remembered – wars, cultural Westernization, serfdom, political conservatism and all – regardless of actual relevance. The real task is more complicated: knowing the data is essential, but selecting from it and recombining it to deal with the question asked is equally essential.
Effective argument (whether written or oral) thus involves stating a clear analytical problem, rather than just jumping in with some summaries of factual data. It requires some kind of logical sequence in an argument, in which the answer to the problem is presented but with an orderly citation of evidence as proof. Where time and sophistication permit, noting the most plausible objections to the solution to the problem, or at least additional issues that must be resolved, will actually enhance credibility. Forming arguments, and knowing the presentation and selection techniques that convey arguments, must be central to the process of doing world history well.
HISTORY SKILLS AND HABITS
History as a discipline involves several analytical categories. A key building block centers on handling source materials and also dealing with debated interpretations. History is not unique in defining opportunities here, but history sources, in particular, because they derive from different time periods, raise some particular challenges that win wide attention, and students can approach these challenges explicitly. A second category involves using historical data to test larger theories or propositions about human behavior or historical patterns, and also claimed relationships between developments at one time and those at another – the kind of thinking wrapped up in historical analogies. World history courses, which typically work hard on handling sources, are less focused on the skills associated with theory testing, but some awareness is appropriate.
The grandmother of all historical habits, however, involves dealing with change over time. Here, a number of steps can be identified
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that break this category into sequential chunks. Specific world his- tory emphases, within the larger change-over-time rubric, can also be highlighted in advance.
INTERPRETATION AND SOURCES
Diverse interpretations are a standard part of work in history (and many other disciplines) – historians love to disagree with each other, sometimes almost to excess. The category has not, however, been a clear component of world history until relatively recently. World historians worked hard to get their field established. Often, they spent a fair amount of time expressing themselves through textbooks, and textbooks tend to emphasize (or overemphasize) certainties rather than deliberately raise debate. As world history matures, different interpretations begin to emerge more clearly. And imaginative teachers often believe that precisely because text- books often loom large, it is vital to get students thinking about alternative viewpoints, often treating textbooks themselves in terms of points of view rather than definitive statements of truth.
We’ll be talking later, in Chapter 9, about some of the leading current controversies in the field. For now, the point to establish is that students in world history should expect to gain experience in identifying the fact of controversy andfiguring out how to manage the problems that controversy presents. They should be able to articulate what a significant debate is about and how the positions of protagonists can be explained, what kinds of evidence are used by each “side,” and, ideally, how the debate might be resolved – through some sort of compromise, or through additional evidence. They should be able to incorporate the controversy into their own argument about a world history issue, and though they cannot be expected to resolve the controversy they can be asked to indicate what line of argument strikes them as most reasonable and accurate, and why.
An example is essential to pin down these general points. The issue is: what impacts did the Cold War have on world history between the late 1940s and the late 1980s? As part of exploring the issue, students encounter a basic debate about what caused the Cold War in the first place. One line of argument holds that the Cold War originated from the aggressive intentions of the Soviet
Union, bent on expanding its territory, and the related global ambitions of communist ideology, which hoped and expected to export a socialist system around the world. Against this, both Soviet apologists and revisionist Western scholars emphasize how cautious the Soviet Union was, how it was principally eager to control a buffer zone around its own territory to prevent a repetition of something like the Nazi invasion, and how American policy, though ostensibly responding to the Soviets, actually frightened the Russians while encouraging a variety of global interventions from the United States side. A student should be able to define what the debate is all about and explain what kinds of evidence each party to the controversy uses; the student should be able to speculate, at least, about what other factors might explain the positions involved. American revisionists, for example, began to surface in the 1960s, as the Vietnam War dragged on – timing here may help explain why they began to differ from earlier American Cold War analysts. Differences between American and Soviet scholarly context also enter in, as well as ideological positions (communist or leftwing vs. conservative and capitalist). A student may also be able to explain why one position seems better-founded than the other. And the student should certainly be able to situate the controversy in the larger assignment of figuring what Cold War impacts have been – an assignment that includes but goes well beyond the responsibility issue. None of this requires the student to resolve the controversy– after all, scholars who devote their lives to the field continue to argue, and students have far less time, data or experience at their command. But understanding and interpreting the debate can be expected, as part of making students more comfortable with the fact that historical interpretations are not cut and dried, that they compel a capacity to grapple with division and uncertainty.
After all, in dealing with real-world issues today, debates are plentiful. Experience in world history should encourage students to step back from, say, a media blitz about a current international issue to offer a definition of the debate (rather than a thoughtless embrace of simply one side), a weighing of the evidence and the reasons for differing points of view, and a determination of what steps would provide the most responsible resolution – through compromise, additional data or even further points of view. Passionate commitment may usefully result, but it should come after, not
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before, a recognition of standard controversy management. Experience in world history actively contributes to this vital but challenging process.
Use and interpretation of sources is a far more familiar aspect of world history programs than is exposure to conflicting viewpoints. There’s nothing more popular with history teachers who are eager to escape an exclusive textbook diet than to add some primary materials to the mix, and world history has participated in this trend extensively. Students in good programs, from high school onward, can expect to encounter expectations that they improve their skills in assessing documents and in marshalling them to form arguments. They want to be able to use and combine documents to respond to questions that go beyond simply summarizing the material itself. For many teachers, the skills involved are fundamental to the capacity to “think like a historian,” and indeed it is true that historical scholars must learn how to interpret a variety of materials as the basis for their own accounts. Perhaps more relevant – though there’s nothing wrong with thinking like a historian – is the fact that people are presented with primary materials all the time, whether it’s politicians’ speeches or advertisements – and the capa- city to interpret them, to assess bias and meaning, is fundamental to functioning adequately in modern life. Gaining experience and improving skills here, as with handling diverse interpretations, provides services well beyond the world history classroom.