This is hard

I have a new and ever growing respect for world historians. Writing about world history for other world historians or graduate+ students is actually a lot of fun. We generally have one or two fields we know well and have the skill sets to work comparatively, trans-regionally/nationally, etc., etc. Teaching world history, heck, lecturing in world history to undergrads many of whom have no-to-very-little basis for the historical narrative we're creating is really - freakin' - hard.

It's very hard to do transregional work if the students don't know any of the histories of the regions. If you take the time to dig into the political-economic histories of each region, you lose the world picture - but if you don't, you lose your students to broad generalizations as important political-economic histories become mushed into "Europe" or "South East Asia". World history is in some ways trying to deconstruct a canonical story of European domination that students either 1) "know', but only in a very general sense, or 2) have grown up almost without. I feel stuck between being boring b/c I'm being to general and being boring because I'm too specific.

I'm also realizing how much of this is more easily done in writing than in speaking/lecturing. In written work, you can take a paragraph to get through "necessary" background or context, or better yet, assume your reader is relatively well-informed, or will at least take it upon themselves to inform themselves. You don't have the luxury when lecturing. And you really don't have that luxury when trying to put together a substantive lecture on wide range of space and time.

Even more, I'm learning about how little I know when I try to teach this to other people. I feel so out of place outside of Europe and so ashamed for only knowing European languages. I can't treat the rest of the world on par with what I can do with European history. I can pick up and read an early modern recipe in English - I can't do that with old recipes in Chinese or from any non-European, lets be honest, non-modern language sources. I can talk about the different use of spices in England, Germany, Italy, France... but all I can really say about China is that there was a heavy trade in cloves, but our sources are scant and merely speculative - which is what every freakin' article I read on the subject said. The more and more cautious historians are with their own conclusions, the harder it is to rely on their work. I understand why they are cautious and that you can spend 30 years trying to sort through sources to confirm that the use of a specific character in Chinese port records probably represents shipments of cloves, but that you can't be 100% certain b/c the sources aren't 100&, but they are very suggestive... But in lecture, unless its your own research, this all comes off as several minutes of context (the sources, speculative work) before getting to the actually important statement (about the clove trade in China), followed by dismissal of "so they dont' really know" and "why should I care". I can always just plow ahead and say things like, "we know there was a vibrant clove trade in China between 1000-1400", in which 30 pages of an article is compressed to one, 10 second sentence.

So much of world history is putting together a relatively familiar body of knowledge in a new way, or revisiting an old debate with new evidence. The other half is just writing the history (of say the clove trade in China 1000-1400), in the first place. In which your contribution is that there was a trade and now you've written about it. But all of this is very difficult to distill to undergrads in a meaningful way that follows a logical progression - without putting them all to sleep or doing the "it's a Small World/World's Fair" version of history.

Lessons learned today:
-1/2 the class walks out during the break between your lectures. Problem: 1/2 the class leaves. Advantage: you get to have a good discussion with the ones who actually care
-I need to be even better organized and clear in my lectures. I need to introduce a concept, define terms, and then get into the narrative. I've been trying, but what I'm doing still isn't good enough.
-I'm much better with European History then with world history. And I'm better with Central and South American history than I am with Central and Eastern Asian history.
-trying to take a view of the world history from one perspective is much easier than trying to synthesize many perspectives into one world history.
-the Spice trade is really cool, and medieval cooking is really cool, and I don't think I successfully conveyed either of those today.
-I'm looking forward to TAing for English History in the fall. Kings, Queens, and an island... it all sounds so easy...