Each age writes its own history. Not because the earlier history is wrong, but because each age faces new problems, asks new questions, and seeks new answers. This precept is self-evident today when the tempo of change is increasing exponentially, creating a correspondingly urgent need for new history posing new questions and offering new answers.
Each age writes its own history. Not because the earlier history is wrong, but because each age faces new problems, asks new questions, and seeks new answers. This precept is self-evident today when the tempo of change is increasing exponentially, creating a correspondingly urgent need for new history posing new questions and offering new answers.
Our own generation, for example, was brought up on West-oriented history, and naturally so, in a West-dominated world. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were an era of Western hegemony in politics, in economics, and in culture. But the two World Wars and the ensuing colonial revolutions quickly ended that hegemony, as evidenced by the disappearance of the great European empires from the maps of the world. The names and the colors on the maps changed radically, reflecting the new world that had emerged by the mid-twentieth century.
Slowly and reluctantly we recognized that our traditional West-oriented history was irrelevant and misleading in this world. A new global perspective was needed to make sense of the altered circumstances. The transition from the old to the new was achieved, albeit with much soul searching and acrimony. By the 1960s the reality of the shift was evident in the emergence of the World History Association, in the appearance of the Journal of World History, and in the publication of the first edition of this text.
This brings us back to our original question: Why publish a new edition for the twentieth-first century, only a few decades after the first edition? The answer is the same as the answer given to justify the first edition: a new world requires a correspondingly new historical approach. The postcolonial world of the 1960s necessitated a new global history. Today the equally new world of the 1990s, and of the twentieth-first century, requires an equally new historical approach. The new world of the 1960s was in large part the product of the colonial revolutions. The new world of the 1990s , as Pope Pius VI noted, is the product of the “magic influence of science and technology”. The pervasiveness of this influence is evident in the “gigantic problems” it has created in all aspects of our lives. For example, students of the late twentieth century doubtless remember their daily prostration under their wooden desks, probably wondering what protection those flimsy structures could offer against nuclear bombs.
The generation of students had to face up to not only new dangers to human life, but also to unprecedented peril to the mother Earth which had given birth to that life. Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau has warmed: Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the twentieth century than in all previous human history. Likewise the environmental organization Worldwatch Institute concluded in 1989: By the end of the next decade the die will pretty well be cast. As the world enters the twentieth-first century, the community of nations either will have rallied and turned back the threatening trends, or environmental deterioration and social disintegration will be feeding on each other.
昨天一名学生看北大出版的斯塔夫里阿诺斯所著《全球通史》第七版时,问我,“P56上黄河流域的文明起源怎么是BC3000年,而不是你经常讲的BC15世纪?”我对照了英文版,写得明明白白“in the yellow river valley of China about 1500 B.C.E”,就这么凭空翻译变出了1500年历史!
(展开)
第十三章,“传统的儒家文明”一章章首语: I am happy because I am a human and not an animal; a male, and not a female; a Chines, and not a barbarian; and because I live in Loyang, the most wonderful city in all the world. Shao Yung (Neo-Confucianist, 1011-10...
(展开)
7 有用 𝐚𝐫𝐨 2018-06-10 21:23:04
此书在国内的人气远超国外 内容偏重论述 历史事件讲的比较简略。。。 文明史就是农耕文化和游牧民族的冲突的历史,文明即竞争
0 有用 要开心 2011-06-05 19:31:51
它足以代表了上个暑假所有苦逼的回忆
0 有用 Stone2CN 2011-06-09 00:12:55
终于读完了……
0 有用 司岱朴 2012-08-14 15:47:43
普及读物。
0 有用 沐风 2006-08-03 08:36:12
发现很全球的眼光
0 有用 RogerWang2333 2024-01-18 16:49:21 浙江
精要 准确 开创了世界史先河
1 有用 观影旅团 2023-10-25 08:28:07 贵州
哪里到二十一世纪了?冷战结束后面的不就没了吗?
0 有用 thisisit 2023-05-14 11:51:36 北京
another book that should be read in middle/high school
0 有用 offer 2023-03-03 07:00:22 浙江
高中是囫囵吞枣过,再重温。
0 有用 . 2023-01-03 19:45:58 安徽
培文书系yyds 有删减