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Is global history still possible or has it had its moment? + The Masada mystery

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https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history...its-moment

EXCERPT: [...] Until very recently, the practice of modern history centred on, and was dominated by, the nation state. Most history was the history of the nation. [...] Then, along came globalisation and the shake-up of old, bordered imaginations. Historians quickly responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crumbling protective ramparts of national capitalism, the boom in container shipping, and the rise of the cosmopolis. New scales and new concepts came to life. Europe’s Schengen Agreement, inked in 1985, the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, and the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995, heralded new levels of international fusion. These now-imperilled treaties promised a borderless world. ‘The world is being flattened,’ Thomas Friedman’s popular manifesto of globalisation, "The World Is Flat" (2005), concluded. ‘I didn’t start it and you can’t stop it,’ Friedman wrote in an open letter to his daughter, ‘except at great cost to human development and your own future.’

As the only game in town, globalisation produced a new popular genre that might be called patriotic globalism. Samantha Power’s "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (2002), Philip Gourevitch’s "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" (1998), and books by Adam Hochschild all gave us horrible crises with would-be heroes fashioned, not as nation-builders, but as humanitarian worldmakers. There was also a surge of stories about a shared, planetary future, with a common, carbon-addicted past. The Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 turned sustainability into a border-busting buzzword and fuelled environmental history. Two decades earlier, Alfred Crosby could not find a publisher who wanted his book "The Columbian Exchange" (1972), which charted the ecological fallout of the integration of the New World biome into the Eurasian system. Now, his book is Biblical.

[...] After years of falling enrollments, declining majors and a dispiriting job market for history PhDs, many saw ‘global history’ as an elixir, a way to return to public relevance. Globalisation had become all the rage.

[...] Not long ago, one of the world’s leading historians, Lynn Hunt, stated with confidence in "Writing History in the Global Era" (2014) that a more global approach to the past would do for our age what national history did in the heyday of nation-building: it would, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had said was necessary of the nation-builders, remake people from the inside out. Global history would produce tolerant and cosmopolitan global citizens. [...] The mild-mannered German historian Jürgen Osterhammel might serve as an example of that global turn. When his book "The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19th Century" (2014) came out in English, one reviewer baptised him the new Fernand Braudel. It was already a sensation in Germany.

[...] Well, that was a short ride. [...] It’s hard to imagine Osterhammel getting invited to the party now. [...] In our fevered present of Nation-X First, of resurgent ethno-nationalism, what’s the point of recovering global pasts? Merkel, daughter of the East, might be the improbable last voice of Atlantic Charter internationalism. Two years after her 60th birthday, the vision of an integrated future and spreading tolerance is beating a hasty retreat.

What is to become of this approach to the past, one that a short time ago promised to re-image a vintage discipline? What would global narratives look like in the age of an anti-global backlash? Does the rise of ‘America First’, ‘China First’, ‘India First’ and ‘Russia First’ mean that the dreams and work of globe-narrating historians were just a bender, a neo-liberal joyride?...



The Masada mystery
https://aeon.co/essays/decoding-the-anci...ean-desert

INTRO: Have archaeologists proven the ancient tale of mass suicide in the Judaean desert or twisted science for political end?
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