Teaching World History

This summer, I will be teaching modern world history for the first time. This is a Herculean task considering that I have problems teaching Eastern or Western history in ten weeks, the length of a quarter at my university, and I will be teaching it during an abbreviated four and a half week half term.

After a week of attempting to prepare a syllabus for this class, I have concluded that the task is impossible. Not in the way that two fermions with identical spin can’t exist in the same space. Rather, it can be accomplished fairly easily if you do a half-assed job, but it simply impossible to do well. At least for me. I think there are about five people on the planet who are qualified to do it, and I’m certainly not one of them.

And, as you might recall, this asshole has tenure.

The typical modern world history course seems to consist of European history plus whatever the instructor happens to have taken a field in; in my case, this is East Asian history, which is what I actually study. I have taught both European and East Asian history many, many times, but, if I’m honest, I’m not even competent enough to teach about the history of all the countries in those areas.

When anyone asks me about the history of Vietnam, for instance, I will say, “I know literally nothing about that,” which is a lie because I have literally never used the word literally correctly.

Via The Daily Mail

I kept yelling “I’m literally covered in bees!” until someone pointed out that they could see my hands.

                                 

My course of study gives some authority to talk about China, Japan, Britain, France and Germany in a serious way, sometimes Russia plus the Netherlands and Italy during very specific eras. Sure those are the places where important stuff actually happened, but there are a dozen countries whose existence I’m only vague aware of. What I know about Polish history is literally a joke (unfortunately, that joke is about the Holocaust, so I can’t even tell it). Iberia, the Balkans, and Scandinavia, and, all solidly in Europe, are rather fuzzy in my mind with the exception of the voyages of exploration, the origins of World War I, and Ikea respectively.

Having said that, the phrase “I know nothing about that” when it comes from a graduate student often means something more akin to “all I know about that is what I learned in a survey class six years ago and I’m afraid someone in the room might actually know what they’re talking about.” I once actually did tell someone that I knew nothing about Vietnam, and then spent the next twenty minutes explaining Chinese political and cultural influence on Vietnam two thousand years ago, but that was only because there was no one else in the room.

Unfortunately I forgot to account for the ninja historian who hides in my classroom, always waiting for me to make the slightest mistake…

If you ask any teacher in the humanities or social sciences, they will tell you that they have to teach classes that cover material that they were never trained in and really don’t know enough to teach, but you might have to get them drunk before they'll admit it. 

"All I know is that I know nothing... and that I'm going to have to run out on this tab because I don't get paid until the end of the month."

There are three common ways of dealing with this issue. 1.) You can read up on all the topics that you don’t know enough about. This is obviously the best way to do things, but, as a corollary, it is also the hardest. It takes a grad student years of studying to become competent enough to take the general exams that qualify him or her to teach a subject, and it'll take a lot of time to become competent in a subject that will never really be of use outside of teaching a class you hate because it’s a survey that only the dumbest of freshmen take. 

2.) You can read the textbook you assigned and hope no one asks questions. The major advantage here is that you only have to read one book and be slightly more competent than an undergrad.

Meet the enemy. Do you think you can outwit these guys? 
If not, quit now.

There is the risk that one of your students will actually know something about the subject, but this can be handled neatly by stating “Oh, I’ve never heard that” or “Hmm… let me get back to you on that.” Unfortunately, if you keep saying those types of things, your students will think you're an idiot, though this may not matter to you because I, for one, have never cared about anything an undergrad has ever said to me.

3.) Finally, you can skip anything you don’t know about, and if asked, you can say that there’s not enough time to cover all the relevant material. I already mentioned that I know nothing about Iberia, Scandinavia, or the Balkans, so I leave them out because I apparently have problems with peninsulas. 

And not just the ones that resemble continental wangs.

                                               

Fortunately, I can get away with not teaching about most of those places because no one notices their absence in a European history course, which, from an objective standpoint, is really, really horrifying. It’s like teaching English and leaving out adverbs. Well, we’re talking about the Balkans, so I guess it’s more of an adjective.  

I have all of these holes in my knowledge-base, and that’s within one of my fields of study.  Now extend that to the world, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is quite large.

Jesus, is it getting bigger?? Since when has there been a New Zealand?  More pressingly, where’s the old one? Wikipedia tells me it’s in Denmark, which makes even less sense to me.

I guess know enough about Europe and East Asia to teach them. So, all that leaves is South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Western Asia (the Middle East)… in Eurasia. Let’s not forget about all of the Americas, Australia, and Africa (in summary, I know nothing about anything about geographic regions that start with an A). And Africa is fucking killing me. I mean, look at it! It’s the second largest continent, and it has about five distinct historical and geographic regions, regions so diverse that talking about “sub-Saharan Africa” is practically a racist way of pretending that “those people” are all the same. 

I told my grandfather about my problem teaching African history, and he said, “All you need to know is that they’re all crazy.” But I keep using this picture of a Zulu warrior as my go to image for racism, so which one of us has a problem?

Hell, I feel racist saying that there are five regions because I’m certain it’s way more complex than that, but I don’t have enough time in a ten week course (condensed to four and half weeks!) to actually deal with any of that complexity. I don’t even have time to read up on the complexity in order to feel guilty about not teaching it. I’m just going to have to assure my students that Africa is more than just an object on which other cultures act. But in the end, I will discuss Africa during the slave trade and the age of high imperialism. I’m afraid I won’t make it to decolonization and my students will think that all Africa needs to end the conflicts is independence.

Yes. After decolonization, there were never any other problems in Africa.

Part of the problem is that there are really two types of history: the history that you find in textbooks and what real historians do. Textbook history takes huge debates and reduces them to two sentences that make one side of contentious issues seem like fact and make generalizations that make experts grind their teeth, all of which is stripped of its evidential basis so that you can’t evaluate anything.

I once screamed at a textbook for claiming that Confucianism was a religion before realizing I was insane.

Textbooks work fine if you know absolutely nothing about a subject or need a very wide angle view. It's not how history really works. Real history is full of footnotes, (usually) cleverly disguised trash talk about other scholars, and more detail than anyone really wants. As a lecturer, I like to know at least something more than what the textbook says so that I can address the big debates and answer student questions. The problem is that there’s no way to learn enough about any one subject to be able to answer all the students’ dumb-ass questions, and after the third disciplinary hearing, I decided that, “I have absolutely no idea what the population of Equatorial Guinea was in 1810, stop asking stupid things you big-eyed freak!” is not a good way of addressing queries. Now expand the subject matter from one or two area you spent years reading about to everything that’s happened in the history of the world. At that scale, I can’t even figure out the contours of the major issues, at least not in the two weeks I have left before the class begins.

Obviously, I could skip everything I don’t know about, but this leaves me feeling like a bad person for skipping all those unique snowflakes of civilizations, especially because the vast majority of the people I’m skipping will be brown. Whether I like it or not, world history for the past five hundred years was heavily shaped by Europeans, whose history I once summarized as follows: "Starting in the 16^th century, Europeans discovered there was a profit in killing, subordinating, and enslaving brown people. Then, for a couple of hundred years, Europeans killed each other over religion, but then they became Enlightened, so they killed each other over who was the most Enlightened. Eventually, they decided to go back to doing what they do best: taking advantage of brown people, though in the twentieth century they went back to killing each other, this time for no reason whatsoever. At this point, the brown people said ‘nuts to this’ and we had decolonization." 

I used to use the Socratic Method, but after years of teaching experience, now I use the “I Don’t Give a Fuck” Method.

Portraying brown people as victims and lacking freewill in their own history is wrong and Eurocentric, which is a word that non-European historians use as a defense mechanism when they’re bored or feel their own research is being ignored by their department.

“Your presentation is very interesting, but now I want to ask a completely unrelated question that will allow me to talk about my own research at great length much to the dismay of the grad students in the back who are only here for the free bagels.”

Besides, skipping any one culture inevitably opens the door to students of that ethnicity complaining that their history got left out. According to this type of student, every single topic we discuss in class perfectly relates to their obscure homeland.

           

"Yes, I’m sure they had trade in Mauritius, random student, now could you kindly tell me where the fuck that is?"

To be perfectly clear, I am a white American academic, which means that I do not really have a desire to interject my ethnic pride into everything. Half of my family is Irish and I feel a loose connect to my Irish ethnicity. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the existence of Ireland in a classroom, and if I have, it was almost certainly a less than complimentary discussion of potatoes. The other half of my family comes from Alsace, which you may know as the cause of, like, half the wars in European history.

Although no one knows “who will die for Danzig”, apparently everyone in Germany and France was willing to die for the vineyards of my ancestral homeland.

Even though competing French and German claims to Alsace plays a vital role in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, I don’t mention it in my European history classes because it just doesn’t matter enough. 

Regardless of all of my trouble organizing my class, ultimately I'm sure I'll fall back on the most important lesson I learned from undergrad: if I leave it to the night before it's due, I'll probably do a decent job in spite of all of my procrastination.