history is living and relevant to current concerns, not the “dead hand of the past,”
The author is arguing that studying history helps us understand problems we face today. New events and new research can change what questions we ask about the past.
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humans are changing, overwhelming, or displacing other global processes of nature
This shows us how environmental history has become more relevant over time. The author is stating that humans do not exist separately from nature, but that our actions can affect entire ecosystems.
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“The Rise of the West.” The new scholarship on Asia—which Jack Goldstone dubbed “The California School” because so many of us lived, worked, or published in California—raised questions about how and why the modern world came to have its essential characteristics: politically organized into nation-states and economically centered around industrial capitalism. Our findings that Asian societies had many of the characteristics others had seen as exclusively European and thus “causes” of the “European miracle” led us to argue that similarities cannot cause differences and to look for alternative explanations for how and why the world came to be the way it is. Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz pulled this scholarship into two important books that changed the way we now understand how the world works, decentering Eurocentric explanations of history.
This is important because it challenges the typical way history is taught that Europe is the main force behind global development.
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The past may not change, but our history of it does.
This stands out to me because it explains that history is not just a big collection of facts together, history is constantly being reexamined rather than one simple answer.
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