History majors should have a more global perspective

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How come history majors are required to take more Western-centric courses over Afro-centric or Eastern-centric histories? As History majors, a global perspective is essential.

Most students’ experiences with history beyond the United States begin and end with global or world history in high school— thousands of years summed up in about eighteen months. As someone with a deep, abiding, soul-consuming, and all-encompassing love of history, I eagerly anticipated my college years. I wished to know more and explore areas of the world I had only briefly touched upon in my studies. Expanding my worldview and understanding different cultures and their histories were central motivations in choosing my history major. 

When I entered DegreeWorks to plan for my registration, however, I surmised that this global perspective may not be as important to the department as a whole; to fulfill the requirements, history majors need one United States (US) history course, one European history course, and one “LACAANA” course, which encompasses Latin American, Caribbean, Asian, African, and Native American history. This means that a history major at SUNY Geneseo could obtain their degree having taken no history courses that cover material beyond the Western world. 

I find this system unacceptable. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to broaden students’ perspectives and to force us to engage with ideas we have not yet encountered. In studying peoples, histories, and cultures distant and different from our own, we gain a valuable understanding and become more globally aware. We are forced, too, to confront the prejudices and misconceptions we have formed due to a variety of influences, including even accepted narratives that are present in widely used school textbooks. 

We spend little time on non-Western histories in our high school classes, and our time is often filled with incomplete and inaccurate portrayals of these histories and cultures. The way the history major requirements are organized actively hinders growth and learning, preventing students from —or at least not pushing them toward— correcting or complicating the narratives they were previously taught. 

It also reinforces a worldview that places Western histories above other regions. It groups together multiple continents, encompassing an extremely wide range of peoples and cultures. The United States gets its own category —which one could explain away, as we do live in the United States and thus place a greater emphasis on its history— but why is Europe, one singular continent, given its own category, while three other continents are forced into one? What importance does European history have that African, Asian, or Latin American history does not? 

Commonly accepted is the idea that modern society is built upon Greco-Roman foundations, which assumes that modern Western society maintains supremacy and that non-Western cultures and ideas have not significantly influenced it. Eurocentrism remains an issue in scholarly work and in our Western culture generally. Value and respect are bestowed upon names like Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Kant, etc.— but most people would be hard-pressed to name a non-Western thinker beyond Confucius. Those scholars are not given the same level of importance; they are mentioned in the peripherals. 

One might be tempted to believe that this is due to a relative lack of influence compared to the aforementioned European thinkers, but I would argue that it is instead created and enabled by systems like our Geneseo history requirements; it is formed by systems that focus on Western history (specifically the United States and Western Europe), ignoring or simply sidelining the vast, diverse, essentially important, and incredibly interesting global histories left to explore. 

History majors should be encouraged and expected to know much more than United States and European history, and the Geneseo History Department should consider reorganizing its curriculum to combat the Western-centric perspective it currently enforces.