ABSTRACT
Teaching world history today brings new rewards as well as new difficulties, both arising from the radical indeterminacy of the present time. In his essay for this volume, Peter Stearns describes the period 1000 to 1500 as “waiting for the Western shoe to drop,” a situation that is more often referred to as the “Rise of the West.” So inexorable and powerful was this rise that for five centuries it seemed impossible that the trajectory would ever curve into a fall. But in the twentieth century, cyclical theories of history emerged among poets like Yeats as well as historians like Toynbee and Spengler, signaling unease and uncertainty about the still ascendant West. Paul Kennedy’s recent and popular book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, flatly announced what would have once been virtually unthinkable.
