Lynn Hunt on Globalization and History
Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA chimes in with a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education here on the role that globalization takes on in historical writing today. "Two new developments are reshaping the way we study history," begins the piece.
The social and cultural theories that stimulated much of our writing, from the 1950s on, have lost their vitality, creating uncertainty about how history will be written in the future. At the same time, talk of globalization has proliferated like kudzu; it coils around any attempt to determine the direction of the future or the meaning of the past. Is globalization the new theory that will reinvigorate history?Hunt's article is excerpted from a forthcoming book on writing and teaching history in a globalized age that we look forward to discussing this September.