Putting The World In World History Textbooks

Abstract

In 1978, my division chair asked me to create a new history course for the honors program being established at the Portsmouth Campus of Tidewater Community College in Virginia, specifically to create an alternative to the surveys of United States History and Western Civilization that would be truly global in scope. The description for this new course, then and now, remains the same, "World Civilization surveys Asian, African, Latin American, and European Civilizations from the ancient period to the present." Thus was born the History of World Civilization, a two-semester course now taught at all twenty-three community colleges in Virginia and currently registered for honors and non-honors credit by Tidewater Community College students to fulfill a graduation requirement of six hours of an international course.