The Toynbee Prize Foundation regrets to announce that Raymond Grew, a Board of Trustees member of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, former President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, and a leading scholar of global history, social history, and comparative history, passed away in September 2020. Grew, who was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Michigan, was 90.

As we face a set of unknown changes to humanities scholarship and education that will inevitably unfold in the coming months, we are confronted with the meaning of Global History and the directions in which it will move. In March 2019, precisely one year before the global lockdown, four scholars, Amitava Chowdhury, Heather Streets-Salter, Julia McClure, and Joseph McQuade, reflected on how the field of global history developed over the course of their careers and imagined future directions. With special attention to how the roots of what we call global history today developed institutionally, our panelists discuss how graduate education in global history developed and what shape it might take in the future.

The digital revolution has seen millions of pages of Spanish manuscripts digitized and shared through the free PARES (portal de archivos españoles) platform in recent years, the Spanish government’s archive web portal. These include sources for the study of topics including Iberian voyages of discovery and conquest, the Atlantic slave trade and the diverse experiences of slavery in the Iberian world, and indigenous revolts against colonial rule such as the Tupac Amaru rebellion. Scott Cave led a one-hour ‘hands on’ seminar guiding participants on how to find and read digitized documents relating to this rich history through PARES.

Job opportunity at the European University Institute

Sujit Sivasundaram and Chris Clark discuss the coronavirus pandemic and the history of animal-human encounters.

Adam Tooze and Chris Clark discuss the economics of the coronavirus pandemic.