History culture and the dream of a one size fits all synthesis

 For the past weeks I have taught seminars on the use of history and history culture. This is not an area of history that I specialise in and I also think that a lot of the theoretical writing on the subject sometimes is both to complex (often invoking everything from Marx and Foucault to that in betweeen) and sometimes to simplified (often these texts highlights a schematic of how people use history in a matrix, thus lessening the complexity of the issue). However, when you teach about teaching, it always become inevitable that you start to reflect around your own practices.

In my career as a history teacher at the university level, I have come to conclude that large historical overviews are often lacking in some way or another. Perhaps this is due to the complexity in writing a global history on around 1500 pages and with several authors involved. There are however some parts of writing synthesis that more complex than others given our current culture.

As a student I personally had “a history of world societies” as an introduction. In many ways this was quite a good book, but it is lacking in the perspective that it becomes far to easy to fall into the trap that our current nation states are the same as the states described in medieval times and early modern times. It also departs from the processes that led to the creation of these states, thus rendering the current European nation states as the only possible development. On the other hand, it would be rather impossible to describe all other turns history could have taken. Still, it reinforces the idea of the divine nation state as a predestination.

If we still accept the idea of the nation state, we come to yet another problem and that is that every country have a different history culture. This makes certain actors of more interests than others. In the case of a history of world societies, it commonly use the celts as a typical barbarian tribe. This is not very surprising, giving the books Anglo-Saxon origin. For a swede or a Dane, the tribes in northern Germany would be an example of more relevance, none the least since these tribes also differs from their Celtic counterparts. Or to put it more blunt: in Swedish history writing, the vikings and the tribes around the Baltic Sea might be of more interest given our own history culture. 

Given all this criticism, the effort to write a global history is still very much needed. I can also see that many publishers today experiments a lot with the format, and perhaps we are going towards a development were the teaching material id tomorrow might not be perfect, but better than today. 

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