Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 20 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article poses questions and offers reflections on the most general type of thinking entailed in the study of world history. It addresses the common and contested ways of knowing the world and its past that are shared among us. It discusses the current state of epistemology in world history by giving brief and illustrative references to the development of global epistemology. The article focuses on current issues and current debates, regardless of whether they are new debates or old debates. The ‘historical record’ consists of the currently available evidence on past events. It can expand as more evidence is added with time and as new discoveries and new methods enable the retrieval of additional information on the past. But the historical record can contract as information is lost or forgotten. Finally and most common in usage is ‘history’ as representations of the past.

Keywords: world history, historical record, global epistemology, past evidence

Patrick Manning

Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.