@magazinearticle {302001,
	title = {The New Histories},
	journal = {Harvard Magazine},
	year = {2014},
	abstract = {IN MAY 1968, the university{\textquoteright}s students wanted to change the world. Left-thinking ideologies like Maoism and socialism were in their minds, and {\textquotedblleft}Vietnam{\textquotedblright} was on their lips. They went on strike, skipping classes and exams. They rioted and clashed with police. One student was killed, 900 arrested.
If this sounds like a scene from Kent State, where student demonstrators were killed two years later, that is because the May 1968 unrest at the University of Dakar in Senegal was part of the same general mood around the world that moved students to protest, says\&nbsp;Omar Gueye, professor of history at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. Gueye spent six months at Harvard during the 2013-14 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at the\&nbsp;Weatherhead Initiative on Global History\&nbsp;(WIGH), a program premised on the belief that events like these{\textemdash}not unlike the seemingly contagious uprisings of the Arab Spring{\textemdash}can be fully understood only in a global context. As elsewhere during the student protests of the late 1960s, local factors played a role in Dakar: government cuts in scholarship funding precipitated the strike. But student anger tapped a deeper sense of injustice as well: although French colonial rule had ended in 1960, the university was still French, Gueye explains, and the French military was still stationed in Dakar. {\textquotedblleft}Vietnam{\textquotedblright}{\textemdash}another former French colony{\textemdash}therefore had a specific resonance among Senegalese students, who felt a sense of brotherhood with the Vietnamese.
HISTORIANS\&nbsp;increasingly recognize that trying to understand the past solely within the confines of national boundaries misses much of the story. Perhaps the integration of today{\textquoteright}s world has fostered a renewed appreciation for global connections in the past. Historians now see that the same patterns{\textemdash}colonialism, or the rise of small elites controlling vast resources{\textemdash}emerge across cultures worldwide through time, and they are trying to explain why. {\textquotedblleft}If there is one big meta-trend within history, it is this turn toward the global,{\textquotedblright} says\&nbsp;Bell professor of history Sven Beckert, who co-directs WIGH. {\textquotedblleft}History looks very different if you don{\textquoteright}t take a particular nation-state as the starting point of all your investigations.{\textquotedblright}
The rise of a global perspective is one of several trends that are changing the way history is studied and understood.\&hellip;},
	url = {http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/11/the-new-histories},
	author = {Sven Beckert and Shaw, Jonathan}
}
