Ancient History and the Challenge of World History

The teaching of history in the United States has been revolutionized in the past few decades by the emergence of world history as a teaching field. This paper analyzes the challenges and opportunities facing ancient historians as a result of this development. These are threefold: first, ancient historians increasingly will have to teach material for which their graduate training has not prepared them; second, non-ancient historians will define the content of ancient history; and third, defining ancient history primarily as a period of world history will create interesting new research opportunities, particularly with regard to the study of cross-cultural interactions.