"Western Civ" and the staging of history in American higher education

American Historical Review

Volumn 105, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 770-802

  Segal, Daniel A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0007086523     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2651809     Document Type: Review

References (183)

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 20.
2. As Gilbert Allardyce has documented, the teaching of "Western Civ" survey courses at the introductory level in colleges and universities became established only after World War I; see Allardyce, "The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," AHR 87 (June 1982): 695-725. While more global variants of and alternatives to this course began as early as the 1940s, they have become much more prominent over the last quarter-century. For a fuller account of this history, beyond what it is provided below,
3. see Daniel A. Segal, Educated Pasts: The Accrediting of Race and Social Evolutionary States in "Western Civ" and "World History" Textbooks (forthcoming).
4. See also Pierre Bourdieu, "Systems of Education and Systems of Thought," International Social Science Journal 19 (1967): 338-58;
5. Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, R. Nice, trans., 2d edn. (London, 1990);
6. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago, 1993).
7. Biographical sources on Robinson include Harry Elmer Barnes, "James Harvey Robinson," in American Masters of Social Science, Howard W. Odum, ed. (New York, 1927), 321-408;
8. Luther V. Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson (New York, 1946);
9. James T. Shotwell's obituary of Robinson in the AHR 41 (1936): 604-06;
10. J. Selwyn Schapiro, "James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936)," Journal of Social Philosophy 1 (1936): 278-81;
11. Harvey Wish, "James Harvey Robinson and the New History," intro. to the 1965 edition of Robinson's The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook (New York, 1965), v-xxix.
12. Robinson's importance in the history of the Western Civ survey course is a central thesis of Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 695-725. My account of Robinson's role in this history both draws on and, on points of evidence and interpretation, disagrees with Allardyce's.
13. In researching this issue, I have looked only at English-language historians.
14. For discussions of Robinson and the "new history" in the context of the history of disciplinary history, see John Higham, History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 104-16;
15. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), chap. 4;
16. Robert Skotheim, American Intellectual History and Historians (Princeton, N.J., 1966), 66-82;
17. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991), 216, 313-14. The central text in Robinson's own efforts to claim and define the "new history" is New History; other relevant works in Robinson's corpus are discussed and cited below.
18. Ross is an exception here; see Origins of American Social Science, 216, 313-14. In terms of my concerns with Robinson's relationship to the formation of the Western Civ survey course, it is important to note that Allardyce says nothing about Robinson's understanding or representations of human time.
19. Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty," AHR 100 (June 1995): 601, esp. n. 2.
20. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987);
21. Thomas Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), The phrase "the revolution in human time" is from Stocking.
22. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan, 221.
23. On the ethnological and philological projects of tracing the human family tree back to the Flood and thus the very moment of human creation, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 2;
24. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan, chap. 4.
25. The phrase "physical history" is from the title of the classic work of pre-Victorian ethnology, James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813).
26. See Prichard, Researches, George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. (Chicago, 1973).
27. On Enlightenment discourses of civilization, see Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (New York, 1973), 219-58;
28. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 1;
29. Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (New York, 1962), chaps. 1-2.
30. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 326.
31. On the relationship between social evolutionary theory and both Darwin's thought and the reception of Darwin, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 5.
32. On the criteria for the inclusion of words and citations in the OED, see John Willinsky, Empire of Words (Princeton, N.J., 1994). The OED largely avoided terms that were restricted in their circulation to a technical, professional, or disciplinary sphere. On the emergence of the term "prehistory" within archaeology,
33. see Alice B. Kehoe, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (New York, 1998).
34. Oxford English Dictionary, 1st edn., s.v. "Prehistory" and "Prehistorian," emphasis added.
35. As something that is not present in the available record, the relative disinterest in the long chronology within disciplinary history prior to Robinson is not something that can simply be pointed to or demonstrated. Some indications can nonetheless be identified. In Herbert Baxter Adams's exhaustive report, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities (Washington, D.C., 1887),
36. we find only one mention of either the long chronology or prehistoric time. Adams tells of a singular "experiment" at Johns Hopkins to provide beginning undergraduates a "course of introductory lectures on the Origin of Civilization"; Study of History, 201.
37. In England, such figures as William Stubbs, Edward Augustus Freeman, and John Richard Green appear not to have grappled with, or had their historical vision greatly disturbed by, the "revolution in human time." Philippa Levine reports evidence of a friendship between Freeman and E. B. Tylor in her study of shifting relations between antiquarians, historians, and archaeologists, and she recognizes explicitly the importance of the long chronology for the emergence of a disciplinary divide between archaeology and history. It is thus striking that she does not discuss any reactions of Victorian historians to the long chronology. See Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. 26, chap. 7; for other relevant accounts of historians at this time, which by their own silence on the topic register the lack of a strong reaction to the long chronology within disciplinary history,
38. see Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, Ohio, 1985);
39. J. R. Hale, The Evolution of British Historiography (London, 1967), 262-300.
40. Consider the original dates of publication of the following works of social evolutionary anthropology: E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865);
41. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (1871);
42. Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871);
43. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877).
44. On Robinson's forging of the "new history" as a "movement," see Higham, History, 111, as well as the biographical sources given in note 4. Robinson's students included Harry Elmer Barnes, Carl Becker, Will Durant, Dixon Ryan Fox, J. Selwyn Schapiro, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Preston Slosson, and Lynn Thorndike. For fuller lists,
45. see Barnes, "James Harvey Robinson," 338;
46. Richard Hofstadter, "The Department of History," A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University (New York, 1955). Robinson's service on committees concerned with the teaching of history included but was not limited to the Committee of Five of the American Historical Association of 1911 and the Committee on the Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education appointed by the National Educational Association. On Robinson's service on professional committees,
47. see Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson, 52-64.
48. For an account of the meaning and prevalence of this notion in Robinson's milieu, particularly between the turn of the century and World War I, see George Haines and Frederick H. Jackson, "A Neglected Landmark in the History of Ideas," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34 (1947): 201-20.
49. For Robinson's views on the relationship of history to other disciplines, see his New History, 70-100.
50. See also the comments of Preserved Smith, a Robinson student: Smith, "The Unity of Knowledge and the Curriculum," Educational Review 45 (1913): 339-45.
51. Robinson, New History, 239-40, see also 26, 55-59;
52. James Harvey Robinson, An Outline of the History of the Intellectual Class in Western Europe (New York, 1915), 3-4.
53. Ross identifies Lester Frank Ward as Robinson's source for this image; Origins of American Social Science, 313, n. 29.
54. For a variant of this rhetorical figure also used by Robinson, see New History, 22.
55. James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1907-08), 1: iii.
56. See Robinson, New History, 24, chap. 5. Among the "traditional" beliefs that Robinson subjected to some scorn was Christianity; for a student's remembrance of this,
57. see Arthur M. Schlesinger, In Retrospect: The History of a Historian (New York, 1963), 34-35.
58. For this view of the practitioners of "historico-political science," see Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 68-72.
59. Overall, it would not be too much to say that Robinson's "new history" figured science as central to "history" and thus made it a topic for historians. This strand of Robinson's "new history" is extended significantly by his student, Lynn Thorndike, a founding figure of disciplinary history of science.
60. Crane Brinton, "The New History: Twenty-Five Years After," Journal of Social Philosophy 1 (1936): 134-47. Of the items on Brinton's ironic list of what might best be termed "the exotic-ordinary," the whiffletree is, today, particularly obscure.
61. For the record, a whiffletree is a "pivoted swinging bar to which the traces of a harness are fastened and by which a vehicle or implement is drawn"; Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary.
62. Brinton similarly captured and ironized the expansiveness of the "new history" in the title of a subsequent essay, "The New History and the Past Everything," American Scholars (1939): 144-57.
63. Robinson, New History, 240, 58, 240, 154;
64. History of Western Europe, 4;
65. James Harvey Robinson, "'The Fall of Rome,'" in New History, 154-94;
66. "'The Principles of 1789,'" in New History, 195-235.
67. On the kinds of social acts that can be performed with pronouns, see Michael Silverstein, "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description," in Meaning in Anthropology, Keith Basso and Henry Selby, eds. (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1976), 11-56;
68. Pauline T. Strong, "Exclusive Labels: Indexing the National 'We' in Commemorative and Oppositional Exhibitions," Museum Anthropology 21 (1997): 42-56.
69. On the ways cultural notions of time and persons constitute such relational groupings as "predecessors" and "contemporaries," see Clifford Geertz, "Person, Time, and Conduct," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), chap. 14.
70. On the prevalence of exceptionalist understandings of the American nation and its past among social scientists and other historians of this same moment, see Ross, Origins of American Social Science;
71. and Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing." We should keep in mind that even when the exceptionalist discourse opposed "American" and "European," there was also a strong sense that (unmarked) Americans and Europeans shared an encompassing racial identity; there was, in short, a racialized limit to the exceptionalist divide.
72. That the now familiar, if not clichéd, narrative of the West's civilizational lineage was not established as a disciplinary object or school subject prior to this period is suggested, in particular, by the evidence in Adams, Study of History;
73. for a discussion of what we find there in the absence of courses on "Western Civ," see Segal, Educated Pasts, chap. 2. On the notion of "the West" and its civilizational lineage at this time,
74. see Christopher GoGwilt, "True West: The Changing Idea of the West from the 1880s to the 1920s," in Enduring Western Civilization, Silvia Frederici, ed. (Westport, Conn., 1995), 37-62;
75. see also Thomas Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization (New York, 1997).
76. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edn., s.v. "Civilization" (London, 1929); this entry was preprinted as a separate work and provided "as a fitting token" to "the Founder Subscribers of the new Britannica";
77. see James Harvey Robinson, Civilization (London, 1929), 7.
78. See also Robinson, New History, 145.
79. Brinton, "New History: Twenty-Five Years After," 144.
80. Robinson's Introduction to the History of Western Europe (New York, 1904) covered "medieval and modern" history, and
81. The Development of Modern Europe, co-authored with Charles Beard, covered just the modern period.
82. Richard Hofstadter reports that Robinson's single-authored text sold 250,000 copies in its first edition; "Department of History," 224.
83. For Robinson's discomfort over this, see, for example, Robinson, History of Western Europe, 4.
84. The earliest title was "Development of European Culture"; the final title at Columbia was "History of the Intellectual Class in Western Europe." For recollections of this course from Robinson's students, see Barnes, American Masters of Social Science, 375;
85. Hofstadter, "Department of History," 223-24.
86. For the final syllabus at Columbia, see Robinson, History of the Intellectual Class.
87. See also Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 704-05.
88. Robinson, History of the Intellectual Class, 3, 40.
89. Robinson, History of the Intellectual Class, 3.
90. Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 703-06.
91. For evidence of the general form and local variants of the War Issues Course, see Frank Aydelotte, Final Report of the War Issues Course of the Student Army Training Corps (Washington, D.C., 1919).
92. Contemporary Civilization staff, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization: Syllabus, 2d edn. (New York, 1920).
93. Allardyce writes that Robinson's 1915 "class syllabus forecast the outline of the Contemporary Civilization course," and then in a note directs readers to compare the two documents; yet, as I have indicated, the comparison betrays his claim here. Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 705, esp. n. 31. My own account, like Allardyce's, relies on a syllabus published in 1920; I tried unsuccessfully to locate a 1919 edition of this document, and presume that Allardyce's use of the 1920 text indicates that he too was unable to obtain an earlier version.
94. Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 703.
95. Lynn Thorndike, A Short History of Civilization (New York, 1926);
96. Harry Elmer Barnes, The History of Western Civilization (New York, 1935);
97. Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World (New York, 1937);
98. A. E. R. Boak, Albert Hyma, and Preston Slosson, The Growth of European Civilization (New York, 1938);
99. William Bossenbrook and Rolf Johannsen, A History of Western Civilization, 2 vols. (1939), 1;
100. Wallace K. Ferguson and Geoffrey Bruun, A Survey of European Civilization (Boston, 1939);
101. Preserved Smith and Lynn Case, A Short History of Western Civilization (1940);
102. John Geise, Man and the Western World (New York, 1940);
103. Arthur Watts, A History of Western Civilization (New York, 1941);
104. Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture (New York, 1941).
105. For the period prior to 1887, we can turn to Adams, Study of History, for a comprehensive account of what textbooks were in use for history courses; for the first decades of the twentieth century, Hendricks provides a list of widely used textbooks covering either "European" or "general" (or "universal") history, in the course of discussing Robinson's role as a textbook author;
106. see James Harvey Robinson, 68-69, 74-75.
107. On the narrowing of the scope of courses, see Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 700-03.
108. This was the feature of these new textbooks that had been most anticipated in the earlier textbooks authored or co-authored by Robinson.
109. On the texts listed in note 42, the one that departs most from a straight Western Civ narrative is the earliest work, Thorndike's Short History of Civilization. In its extensive accounts of the history of science, Thorndike's text emphasizes the importance of Islamic centers of learning between the Fall of Rome and the end of the fifteenth century. The absence of any comparable geographies digressions from textbooks after Thorndike suggests how quickly the Western Civ genre was codified.
110. Arthur Cross, "The Department of History," The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1944), 619-20.
111. Boak, Hyma, and Slosson, Growth of European Civilization, v, 5.
112. Barnes, History of Western Civilization, v-vi.
113. For a broader discussion of the use of constructions of time in the constructions of Others, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983).
114. Barnes, History of Western Civilization, 42-43.
115. On the use of opposition and negation in the construction of Others, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, R. Needham, trans. (Boston, 1963);
116. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), esp. 45-49.
117. Barnes, History of Western Civilization, 68.
118. Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 706.
119. For two prominent examples of the wider circulation of this view, see Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York, 1997), 116-17;
120. Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston, 1996), 57.
121. To Levine's credit, although he accepts Allardyce's overall narrative, he astutely recognizes the logical inadequacy of Allardyce's analysis, noting that the widespread adoption of the Western Civilization survey course was not an immediate response to the war but took place throughout the 1920s and 1930s. "It would be a mistake," Levine concludes, "to attribute the attraction of Western Civ primarily to international factors." Strikingly, Allardyce's view has even made its way into a contemporary Western Civ textbook. In its preface, The Challenge of the West tells students: "Many American universities introduced Western civilization courses after World War I. Their intent was to explain what the United States had in common with its western European allies, that is, to justify American involvement in a European war." Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenswein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith, The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age (Lexington, Mass., 1997), vii.
122. See Harry Liebersohn and Daniel A. Segal, "Introduction," in Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization, Daniel Segal, ed. (Tucson, Ariz., 1992), xi-xix. On the importance more generally of anxieties and doubts about the civilizational status of Europeans for discourses of civilization,
123. see Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790-1900 (Stanford, Calif., 2000).
124. Thorndike, Short History of Civilization, v.
125. Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, preface to the rev. edn. (New York, 1941), ix.
126. Burns authored eight editions of Western Civilizations before his death in 1972 at seventy-five; the publisher, W. W. Norton, subsequently lined up two new authors, Robert Lerner and Standish Meacham, to revise the book. Standish Meacham, interviewed by the author by telephone, September 2, 1997. Donald Lamm, discussions with the author, autumn 1998, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Lamm served for a time as Burns's editor at Norton and was Norton's chief executive from 1978 to 1996.
127. Eleanor Burns Larson (daughter of Edward McNall Burns), interviewed by the author, tape recording, the former home of Edward McNall Burns in Santa Barbara, California, November 30, 1997.
128. No biography of Burns exists. The narrative given here is based primarily on my interview with his daughter. It is also informed by my discussions with Don Lamm, the extant correspondence between Burns and his editors at Norton (which are housed in the W. W. Norton collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University), and a telephone interview in August 1997 with Henry Winkler (who was a colleague of Burns's at Rutgers), as well as my examination of Burns's published writings.
129. On the increased "cosmopolitanism" and secularism of American intellectuals from the 1930s through the 1960s, see David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
130. Burns, Western Civilizations (1941), xix.
131. Mark Silk, "Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America," American Quarterly 36 (1984): 65-85.
132. On the distinctiveness of this aspect of these textbooks, relative to previous accounts of civilizational progress, see Daniel A. Segal, "Civilization without Kinship" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, Pa., December 1998).
133. In 1910, less than 5 percent of the college-age population went beyond secondary education; for 1920, the accepted figure is just over 8 percent; for 1930, it is over 12 percent; and for 1940, it is nearly 16 percent; see Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States, 1890 to 1940, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 6537 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), fig. 2.
134. On the arrival of Jewish students on U.S. campuses in the decades prior to World War II, see Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, esp. 67.
135. Attempts to produce and market a work that would be like a Western Civ text but more global go back at least as far as T. Walter Wallbank and Alastair Taylor's Civilization: Past and Present (Chicago, 1942). Yet it is really only in the last quarter-century that a significant number of undergraduate-level "World History" textbooks have been written. Prior to 1984, there were only five such textbooks, but between then and 1999, thirteen have been published.
136. For a fuller discussion of the publishing history of these two genres of textbooks, including a catalog of works and their editions for both genres, see Segal, Educated Pasts.
137. For a list of "Western Civilization" and "World History" textbooks published in the 1990s that I have examined, see the Appendix. By my best calculations, during the 1990s some 300,000 copies of these works were in use by undergraduates per year, with 170,000 being "Western Civ" texts and the remainder, "World History" texts. For these calculations, see Segal, Educated Pasts.
138. Stanley Chodorow, MacGregor Knox, Conrad Schirokauer, Joseph R. Strayer, and Hans W. Gatzke, The Mainstream of Civilization, 6th edn. (Fort Worth, Tex., 1994), xviii.
139. Peter N. Stearns, Michael Adas, and Stuart B. Schwartz, World Civilizations: The Global Experience (New York, 1992), xxviii.
140. Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O'Brien, Civilization in the West, 2d edn. (New York, 1995), 4.
141. The cognate sentence in Kishlansky et al.'s "World History" text ends with "appeared," thereby removing the reference to "Jesus," presumably to make the sentence less particularistic;
142. see Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, Patricia O'Brien, and R. Bin Wong, Societies and Cultures in World History (New York, 1995), 2.
143. William Duiker and Jackson Spielvogel, World History (Minneapolis, 1994), 4.
144. See, for examples, Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, prologue;
145. Kishlansky, Geary, and O'Brien, Civilization in the West, 4-7.
146. For the concept of "the educated person," see Bradley Levinson, Douglas Foley, and Dorothy Holland, eds., The Cultural Production of the Educated Person (Albany, N.Y., 1996).
147. The notion that hunting and gathering is an objectively distinct mode of production that characterizes a distinct human type and distinct "peoples," such as the "Bushmen," has increasingly been called into question. See Alan Barnard, The Kalahari Debate: A Bibliographic Essay (Edinburgh, 1992).
148. Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilizations, 15, see also 189.
149. Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, xxxix.
150. The credits at the end of Challenge of the West give the photographer as Marjorie Shostak, author of Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). The woman who appears in the photograph is not identified. Thomas Martin, the author with primary responsibility for this section, told me he suggested the use of this photograph to "the art person hired by the publisher . . . based on having seen it in anthropology texts." Thomas R. Martin, interviewed by the author by e-mail, July 9, 1996. That many of today's textbooks use the !Kung to illustrate prehistory and the time "before civilization" is indicative of the significant circulation of materials from Harvard's multi-year Kalahari project.
151. Chodorow, et al., Mainstream of Civilization, 6.
152. Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, xxxix.
153. For a discussion of the productivity of gathering and hunting, and for a critique of the view that they are distinctively constrained by necessity, see Marshall Sahlins's definitive essay, "The Original Affluent Society," in Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), 1-39; for a study that documents the way hunting and gathering actively intervene in and shape "nature,"
154. see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983);
155. on the complexity of responses to agriculture on the part of hunters and gatherers, see, for example, Roy Grinker, "Images of Denigration: Structuring Inequality between Foragers and Farmers in the Ituri Forest, Zaire," American Ethnologist 17 (February 1990): 111-30.
156. Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, xl.
157. Chodorow, et al., Mainstream of Civilization, 7.
158. T. Walter Wallbank, et al., Civilization: Past and Present, 8th edn. (New York, 1996).
159. Wallbank, et al., Civilization: Past and Present, chaps. 8, 9.
160. The Heritage of World Civilizations is distinctive among "World History" textbooks in that it does include a brief discussion of the relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. state during the nineteenth century, although on the whole the text does not depart from the pattern of coverage of Native American histories that I have outlined here. Albert Craig, et al., The Heritage of World Civilizations, 4th edn. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997), 784.
161. Chodorow, et al., Mainstream of Civilization.
162. One important strategy for displacing this entrenched sequencing and emplotment of "the industrial revolution" has been to construct narratives that highlight the dependence of the English and European experiences on various elsewheres, thereby representing industrialization as globally dispersed, rather than as national or continental "cultural goods." See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982);
163. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985);
164. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
165. To see the pattern of who is added as an author when publishers produce a "World" text from a previously published "Western" ones, compare Kishlansky, Geary, and O'Brien, Civilization in the West, 2d edn.,
166. with Kishlansky, Geary, O'Brien, and Wong, Societies and Cultures in World History;
167. and compare Jackson J. Spielvogel, Western Civilization (Minneapolis, 1991),
168. with Duiker and Spielvogel, World History.
169. The Kishlansky et al. "World History" volume is listed as authored by Kishlansky, Geary, O'Brien, and Wong "with" five additional authors. Of these, one contributed additional material on China, two contributed material on the Middle East, another contributed material on Africa, and the last contributed material on Latin America. The lesser billing given to these authors indicates accurately the lesser attention given to these additional parts of the world, and of course, the patterns of coverage and exclusion are complex. One needs to consider, for example, the uniform absence from these texts of contributors with expertise about Oceania or Native Americans, as well as the selection of topics within, say, African or Latin American history. For an insightful discussion of the exclusion of African histories from "world history" in the works of a number of major historians,
170. see Steven Feierman, "African Histories and the Dissolution of World History," in Africa and the Disciplines, Robert Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr, eds. (Chicago, 1993), 167-212.
171. The phrase "people without history" was, of course, famously ironized by Eric Wolf; Europe and the People without History.
172. For examples, see Daniel Segal, "Discovery in the Text: The Making of 'Races' in the Undergraduate 'Western Civ' and 'World History' Textbook," in Commemoration and Critique: Essays on the Politics of Historical Representation, Pauline T. Strong, ed. (Durham, N.C., forthcoming).
173. Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilizations, 387.
174. Sahlins, "Original Affluent Society," 1. The quotation is taken from Sahlins's brief discussion of a quite similar pattern of dismissing difference in economics textbooks and "treatises on development."
175. For an exemplary and highly influential text in this strand of Boasian anthropology, see Franz Boas, "On Alternating Sounds," American Anthropologist 2 (1889): 47-51.
176. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934; Boston, 1959), 5, 56.
177. In effect, I am suggesting that disciplinary history has been defined, at least in part, as the study of historic time and its contents, as distinct from prehistoric time and its contents. By contrast, a more established view tells us that disciplinary history was founded not on a particular understanding of human time but on the increased use of "documentary materials and source criticism," to quote Doris Goldstein. The alternative I am proposing situates disciplinary history more in relation to the coeval division of academic labor between disciplines and less in relation to antecedent work by so-called amateur historians. For the more established view, see Goldstein, "The Professionalization of History in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Storia della Storiografia 3 (1983): 3-27;
178. Jann, Art and Science of Victorian History, epilogue.
179. The position that my overall argument falls apart in the face of the "undeniable" fact that "we today" live more "civilized" lives than did the earliest human ancestors was cogently argued by one of the anonymous reviewers for this journal; I thank that reviewer for her/his willingness to engage views that s/he found so patently wrong-headed.
180. For an example of such an attempt, see Lévi-Strauss's comments on human "origins," in "The Concept of Primitiveness," in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago, 1968), 351.
181. For how one such group, the Pajonal Ashéninka, view civilarse ("civilization"), see Hanne Veber, "The Salt of the Montaña: Interpreting Indigenous Activism in the Rain Forest," Cultural Anthropology 13 (August 1998): 384. According to Veber, the Pajonal Ashéninka represent an unusual case of effective organizing by Amazonian peoples to sustain indigenous practices of production while engaging civilization.
182. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, "Problems in the Study of Hunters and Gatherers," in Lee and DeVore, Man the Hunter, 2.
183. On this point specifically in relation to Africa, see Joseph C. Miller, "History and Africa/Africa in History," AHR 104 (February 1999): 9.