Editor's Message

Marc Jason Gilbert

     The challenges faced by world historians have grown in keeping with the rapid change in world culture that evermore plays out visibly in day to day events. This issue of World History Connected addresses how traditional research and teaching are advancing to keep up, while not losing sight of long-standing fundamental processes and values of historical thinking. Thus, its Forum is devoted to the present effort to adjust (“tuning”) the introductory course in history to better serve history education and help preserve the field of historical inquiry itself. Articles address our expanding view of de-colonization and de-centering the place of globalization in space and time so as to remind us that globalization studies should acknowledge what too often seems to be new hierarchies and exclusions arising from the methodologies that are, in fact, “continuous with older forms of inequality.” This issue also introduces the first of what may become an occasional series of new long form contributions. Thomas Mounkhall, a longtime contributor to this journal and investigator of all things Oaxacan, has produced a book on using that city and its environs deliberately after the manner of Donald R. Wright’s The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia (2004). He has graciously offered this study to World History Connected with a view to reach the largest number of readers, which, incidentally, now average 750,000 people who view more than one article annually. Peer reviewers have been very generous in their praise of this work, to the delight of this editor, whose love for world history began as an adolescent, deepened over the years, and has been recently rekindled by Thomas Mounkhall's research.

     In the near future, issues of World History Connected will explore new approaches to the First World War in World History, address the significance of Exhibitions in world history, and revisit the Mongol Empire in new and different ways. World History Connected welcomes the submission of articles and reviews on these and any other subject that can advance research and teaching in the still evolving field of world history.

Marc Jason Gilbert, Editor
Hawai'i Pacific University

Marc Jason Gilbert is Professor of History and National Endowment for the Humanities Endowed Chair in World History at Hawai'i Pacific University. He can be reached at mgilbert@hpu.edu.