Mitreden über Weltgeschichte –: die Beteiligung polnischer, tschechoslowakischer und ungarischer Historiker an der UNESCO-Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind (1952–1969)

This article reconstructs the participation of historians from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in international projects and transnational networks of world history writings in the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on the International Commission for a Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind (SCHM), which compiled a six-volume world history in collaboration of over 300 scholars, educators and politicians under the auspices and based upon the membership of the UNESCO. The institutional setting and the thematic orientation of SCHM are presented and the contributions of East Central European scholars are traced. From there on it follows other international contexts where Polish, Czechoslovak and Hungarian scholars sought to promote global interpretations of the past, which included their region. In sum one specific facet of the transnational entanglements of East Central European societies during the time of the Cold War is illustrated and retrieved from being buried by both, a solely national history of these societies and a world history discussion centred largely on North American and Western European traditions

Global History 2008–2010:: Empirische Erträge, konzeptionelle Debatten, neue Synthesen

Global History 2008–2010: Empirical results, conceptual debates and new synthesis Since the late 1980s world and global history is on its current road to success within the discipline of history and has thus invited for comments, which have been made from different angles. This article continues these accompanying, reflective voiced by both limiting itself and enlarging the perspective. It is confined narrowly since it focuses on the developments of the last three years while it simultaneously takes into consideration a broader spectre of publication compared to other review articles. At its centre is the observation of a double trend: on the one hand a revival of large syntheses takes place, reflecting the interest of a wider audience global interpretation of the past as a preliminary to understand the present (and these including publications designed for teaching at the Bachelor and Master level); on the other hand in terms of research an “empirical turn” has asserted itself, more and more world and global history is published in specialized monographs. Added to that the article notices an increasing number of workshops, multilateral research groups and academic journals with an internationally composed authorship, which reminds that world and global history today is evolving as a transnational practice and in doing so is forerunner in the future course of the academic historiography and neighbouring discipline