A Global History读书介绍
| 类别 | 页数 | 译者 | 网友评分 | 年代 | 出版社 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 书籍 | 672页 | 9.3 | 2020 | 北京大学出版社 |
| 定价 | 出版日期 | 最近访问 | 访问指数 |
|---|---|---|---|
| USD 31.20 | 2020-02-20 … | 2020-03-07 … | 77 |
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.
作者简介斯塔夫里阿诺斯是美国加州大学的历史学教授，享誉世界的历史学家，曾获得过古根海姆奖、福特杰出教师奖和洛克菲勒基金奖等一系列学术荣誉。虽然他以《全球通史》闻名全世界，但实际上他著述颇丰，还有大量其他作品为学术界所称道。除《全球通史》外，斯塔夫里阿诺斯的其他作品还包括《1453年以来的巴尔干各国》、《奥斯曼帝国：它是欧洲的病人吗?》、《全球分裂：第三世界的历史进程》和《源自我们过去的生命线：新世界史》等。
斯塔夫里阿诺斯教授已于2004年3月23日在美国加州拉荷亚去世，本书不但是斯氏《全球通史》的最新版本，也成了其最后版本。
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