ABSTRACT
The rise of world history as a teaching field and, to a lesser extent, a research field is one of the major developments in the discipline over the past three decades. The expansion of the field very much responded to needs, and at the same time it did not follow the most conventional pattern. Unlike Western civilization courses in the early twentieth century, for example, world history was not birthed in one of the prestigious Ivies, nor did it spring primarily from research innovation. Indeed, the emergence of significant new scholarship in many ways followed from the prior efflorescence of world history teaching, though it has come to embellish and sustain the field in many ways. The question of origins is not particularly thorny, because the impelling factors are not obscure. But the distinctive evolution is nevertheless interesting, and it also helps explain some of the hesitations and controversies that have surrounded the teaching of world history and surround it still.
