World History's Narrative Problem
T. Rodriguez, Stanley M. Burstein, Duane Corpis, Julia Foulkes, Barbara Weinstein, Mary Kay Vaughan, Kathryn Litherland, Jerrold Seigel, and Lisa Kung. 1. Jerry H. Bentley criticizes the National Standards for World History, ed. Charlotte A. Crabtree and Gary B. Nash (Los Angeles: The National Center for History in the Schools), for this lack in “The Quest for World-Class Standards in World History,” The History Teacher 28, no. 3 (May 1995): 449–56, esp. 453. In Old World Encounters: CrossCultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 25–26, however, Bentley agrees that the Americas are difficult to write about in terms of the sorts of cross-cultural encounters he discusses. William A. Green gestures to “the minimal attention usually given to sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America” but defends the choice “because the region was not in conversation with other continents until after 1492”; “Periodizing World History,” History and Theory 34, no. 2 (May 1995): 110, 101.