So let's look at contemporary history in the ordinary sense of the word. Contemporary history can appraise the present in its historical context. It can find the gestalt amidst the clutter of our contemporary experience. It can look for the music in the abundant notes produced by the rapidly increasing number of social actors around the world. With history left out, we may learn more and more about the many facets of global change, see the numerous fragments of the whole clearer and clearer, but will never get the whole picture.
Contemporary history is necessary to decipher the signature of the present time.
Global History, I submit. Today the biggest structures and largest processes, permeating macro- and microhistory, are driven by globalization. Past processes of globalization can be detected, but they are structures in the historical background and do not tempt us to proclaim a Global Middle Age in the Middle Ages, for example. Contemporary processes of globalization, however, have moved to the historical foreground. We are observing the globalization of markets, war and politics, tourism, travel, trade and transportation, communication, information, production, consumption, pollution, lifestyles, entertainment and diseases.