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Saturday, December 24, 2011

A Masters in History

This week saw the close of my first class in the Master's program at National University.

My major will be in History. National put students under quite a bit of pressure, you get one class every four weeks. My first class was World History.

World History? You may think that this is a long list of various treaties and monarchs from around the world, maybe even a war or three?  Not a bit of it. Such histories tend to fall into national or regional histories,

World History is bigger than those subjects. The class was more of an historiography of World History, historiography being the study of the ideas which historians use to create history.

World history incorporates ideas such as regional studies,  interractions of societies over time and in it's greatest for the phenomenon called "Big History", a wonderfully simple but complex interdisciplinary study of everything since the Big Bang. Now who'd have thought to see a astrophysicist or biologist teach history, well David Christian thought that very thought and it does make a lot of sense for a student to break away from national history and think in broader terms.

If you want to take a look at World History ideas I'd reccommend The Human Web: A Bird's Eye View of World History J.R. McNeil and William H. McNeilW.W. Norton & Company. New York 2003. The McNeils produce a very tradable book which gives a broad view of human history (5 million years) in less than 400 pages. It is a very good read.

My next class will be Modern China, that begins on January 9, 2012. I am also now in the process of looking into final paper ideas for that class and for my Master's Thesis, that paper will be due sometime in Mid 2013. Or not at all if the History Channel, Nostradamus, and the Mayans were right after all. I will be pretty annoyed if they are right!

Well for now, Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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