Considering the Many Variations of Regional History

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars from all over the world have deliberated the histories of peoples and places for decades. They have different fields of departure, different goals, methodologies, vocabularies, and understandings of regions. Economic and political transformations in the twentieth century have created trends of thought in which studies featured the increasing prominence of humanity’s status, role, and impact, but, not necessarily as a noticeable development in regional studies after the Second World War (1939–1945). Meanwhile, some regional histories were produced on many continents but never as part of the scholarly initiatives in regional studies inspired by multidisciplinary scholarship in Europe and the United States. Reaching out to regional studies associations by history scholars is a twenty-first-century development – while these historians aim at also developing their understanding of what regional history fundamentally is or may imply. Conceptual thought about regions and regional history has aged but remains far from clarity or scholarly maturity. This discussion intends to further stimulate possibilities of the improved understanding of regional history study by debating its many variations as a way forward to recognise and provide structure to the field.