Rapidly increasing globalization gave a rise to global history as a new historical research field. Like its forerunner, i. e. world history, global history also pursues universal history which tries to discover macroscopic and general patterns explica...
Rapidly increasing globalization gave a rise to global history as a new historical research field. Like its forerunner, i. e. world history, global history also pursues universal history which tries to discover macroscopic and general patterns explicable of global dynamic changes. In order to achieve the truly impartial, objective, universal narrative, however, global history sharply departed from world history and aims at shaking the last vestiges of Eurocentrism and Western ethnocentrism away. Especially in the USA, the efforts to transport this new historical paradigm into classroom has never been so active as now. Across the country, four didactic patterns of teaching world history in schools are competing for the attention of educators and the public, i. e. the Western heritage model, social studies world history, multicultural model, and global world history. The state standards of the four biggest states(California, Texas, Florida, New York), which have national influence on curriculum of class and on the content of textbooks, are analyzed to provide a concrete picture of how world history is taught in American schools and what degree of global historical transformation is taking place. The result of analysis shows that the conventional Western heritage pattern is still didactically dominant, but the case of New York presents a strong case for the good chance of proliferation of global history as a didactic paradigm. Especially the recent reform of standards in Florida is a visible evidence that global history paradigm is a desideratum in improving world history class. In contrast, the conservative and old fashioned concept of Texas standards rouses a warning that the influential Texas standards could hamper further global historical reforms.