The World History Courses in the New Framework

In 1987, after two years of development, the California State Board of Education (SBE) approved guidelines for curriculum and instruction in history and the social sciences. In the mid-1990s, following a conservative media assault on the newly published National Standards for History, which undermined their political acceptance among nervous education officials, almost every state initiated its own program to write new history and social studies standards (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn, 1997). [...]the 2017 edition has unavoidably retained much of the region-centered, multiculturalist structure of the original scheme in grades six and seven and some of the Eurocentric bias in grade ten. The new guidelines were anachronistically tied to a document produced three decades earlier, when serious rethinking of world history as both a school and university subject was just getting underway. Since the 1980s, the world history discipline has advanced into previously unexplored territory, manifested in a flood of scholarly literature, many novel topics of study, new ways of configuring time and space, and numerous, ongoing conceptual and interpretive debates among professionals-all of this ferment reflecting the extraordinary transformations taking place in global economy, society, culture, and environment.