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Global Issues

Pitt Historians Think Globally

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Established in 2008 as part of the Department of History, Pitt's World History Center studies the worldwide quilt of peoples and ideas that are linked across space, region, and time.

Professor Marcus Rediker argues that a global view of history helps to overcome the national, racial, and ethnic divisions that human beings place on themselves. Rediker works toward this goal in his own research, which focuses on Atlantic slave ships and the Haitian slave rebellion, among other things.

Visit Rediker's Web site.

Patrick Manning, director of the World History Center, works to overcome the disciplinary divisions that scholars place on their work. His course Interdisciplinary Methodologies introduces graduate students to ways of thinking about historical problems in various disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

Listen to Manning discussing digital history (video).

One tool that helps World History Center researchers to think about humanity globally is the World-Historical Dataverse, an online collection of data for the world as a whole. Each year, the Dataverse project collects data on a single commodity, tracking its global production, trade, and consumption. In 2010, the commodity was opium; in 2011, it was silver. The center also hosts interdisciplinary seminars, conferences, and teaching workshops, all of which build on Pitt’s strong commitment to global research.

Read a Pitt Magazine story on the World History Center.