From the Author to the Reader
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.
这本书很值得读!作者从宏观上整体把握历史,改变了我们过去对历史的分裂式认识。英文词汇比较简单,学历史还能锻炼英语能力。
评分我们所学习过的历史,都很奇怪,注重细节,例如时间、地点、主要人物等,却没有什么连贯性。历史在我们眼里,跟“洋片”差不多,是割断的、静态的、前后没有关联的。而这部《全球通史》,却展示了我们似乎学习过,却从未真正明白过的历史,即这些片段串成的序列,一部本来完整...
评分斯塔夫里阿诺斯的《全球通史》本是极好的,我至今忘不了高中时候从体育老师手中接过这本书读完后的兴奋感,以至于日后面试鄙校历史系新生学妹时,见其不无炫耀的介绍自己高中时候就读过这本书的得意神态,有种似曾相似感。在此之前只有黄仁宇,在此之后仅有皮雷纳、斯宾格勒在...
评分整整两天,终于把实习搞定了 就是翻译这个东西的第26章《欧洲科学革命和工业革命》 相比于一些散文来说(我只读了第26章),这部书的语言很简单(译起来非常容易),对于我这个没有中文功底的人来说都完全没有难度 过了CET6的人应该都可以读得懂吧 虽然整章都是学术性的陈述与...
评分Google有个地图功能,让人可以从外太空例如在月球上的方向,来观看我们这个蔚蓝的星球。并且可以如同坐在从外太空高速飞回或飞走的宇宙飞船上一般,快速地缩小或是拉大。有时候会陶醉于这种美,从外太空看见的美:世界变得如此之小视野变得如此广阔。 看这本书,也宛如通过...
很多感兴趣的问题...
评分买下来了
评分发现很全球的眼光
评分发现很全球的眼光
评分原来,所谓的唯物史观,竟掌握在资产阶级历史学家手中!在全球化的背景下,如何将破碎的地区史整合成全球史,将逐渐成为一个重要的难题。斯塔夫里阿诺斯为我们开了一个好头。
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