In an April 1992 article in Perspectives , I described a proposed PhD program focusing on world history. These students are comfortable in area studies literatures and discourse, but approach their problems globally. The Northeastern University program, while modest in size by comparison to established doctoral programs, appears already to have gathered the largest concentration of doctoral students in world history. A description of this program provides an occasion to ask what role doctoral programs in world history might have in the future of the historical profession. Research in World History As a teaching field, world history has grown dramatically during the last two decades.
World history is now one of the principal high school courses in history, along with U.S. history.
At community college and university levels, world history courses and textbooks equal in number those of Western civilization. Still, the approach of most textbooks and courses in world history, though intended to be global, relies heavily on the national and area studies traditions in which the teachers and authors were trained. To interpret world history as a string of regional histories is one logical approach, but it is not the only one. Research in global history has also expanded during the past generation. Global historians, in constructing a field where there was none, have created an impressive body of scholarship, and have extended their audience from the Journal of World History to their share of articles in the American Historical Review .