hey people. I was wondering what is the best method when studying history; should I pick a time period and then learn the whole world at that period, or just pick a region and learn it since the beginning to present and then go to another region? what are down & upsides of each? and are there other methods that I should be considering?
If you mean studying history in an academic sense, you’ll have to specialise in a certain period and place. No historian knows ‘everything’, and specialisations are commonplace in the academic world. The work by John Tosh, “The Pursuit of History”, might give an insight.
If you want to study history to become a teacher, you’ll have to know the basics of the history of the country/state/whatevs where you’ll be teaching. For example, if you want to teach history in a German school, they’ll expect you to have a general grasp of German, European and world history. At least enough to teach it.
And if you’re doing it for fun, you can focus on whatever you find interesting.
I think there's an underlying issue of interconnectedness of the subjects you're studying going on here: where topics are connected then learning about one helps you understand others (to the point you can't really study one in isolation). For instance, Polybius argues that the history of the Mediterranean (he says 'the world') became fundamentally interconnected in the late 3rd century BCE, with politics interacting from Seleucia and Egypt to Carthage and Spain (and a central role for Rome). So arguably from then until the fall of Rome it's quite hard to study 'Gaul' or 'Macedonia' without major reference to other countries, and what you study about one country will help you understand others and be helped in turn by what you know about those others.
Similarly, studying both Britain and India in 100CE is a fairly arbitrary combinatioin: studying them both at the time of the Raj might make rather more sense.
I'm not sure that a survey either of e.g. 'everything that's happened in Italy' or 'everything that happened in 2nd century AD across the world' have much interconnectedness. It might be more productive to think in terms of a broad 'stage' of history (inevitably crude though that is) and then study what is relevant to that. So if you studied, say 'the Roman Empire' or 'Early Modern Europe' or even 'the rise of Nation-States' that gives you pointers in terms of period and of location, but isn't just a case of studying everything that happened in certain regions or at certain times. Obviously these categories have loose edges geographically/temporally, but they can be broadly made to work.
I'm doing my own 'trying to understand some broad trends of history' thinking (starting with classical Mediterranean) and happy to share if relevant.
Frankly, there is no right or wrong way to approach the study of history and is actually quite a contentious area for historians. Historiography can be approached from many different approaches, how you want to do so is up to you and what you are trying to learn.
For instance, to learn about the daily lives of peasants in a middle age French village (microhistory) you would look at different sources from the life of leaders such as Napoleon (great man history).
So whats the best way to learn history? It's entirely up to you! Follow your interests and learn new methods of interpreting the past to get the answers your looking for. Happy reading!