In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

中文翻译：

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世界历史上的中东：时空重新排序

除了奥斯曼历史的主要研究专业外，我从研究生第一年开始就准备教授伊斯兰中东的历史，并且在我的整个学术生涯中都这样做了，包括让研究生教授奥斯曼和现代中东历史东方历史。我在世界历史上的起步较晚。大约在我获得终身教职的时候，出于可笑的糟糕原因，我的部门决定在 20 世纪开设一门单一的世界历史课程。未曾见证创造从无到有在之前的一次部门会议上，我自愿参加了这门课程。该部门创建这门课程的原因很荒谬，但我认为这是一项宝贵的知识产权。在教学文献的现有状态下，没有人停下来分析使 20 世纪成为一部综合性世界历史书的最后一章的问题。几年后，就在我们第一次完成这门课程的教学时，一位编辑走过来问我有没有想过写一本教科书。是的，我曾想过。只有我认为在有人会问之前会过去很多年。这就是我合着的起源二十世纪的世界，从 1986 年到 2010 年经历了七个版本。如果说每个新版本都需要进行彻底的修订，这将是轻描淡写的说法，因为不仅考虑到年表的延长，而且考虑到文献中经常进行的彻底修订和改进。如果这个演讲听起来更像是回忆录而不是研究论文，原因是我在中东和世界历史的双重生活在教学领域相互作用，提出了一些问题，这些问题在此过程中重新引导了我的基础研究和理论探究。