Myths, wagers, and some moral implications of world history

Journal of World History

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 51-82

  Bentley, Jerry H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORY; IDEOLOGY;

EID: 22144493369     PISSN: 10456007     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2005.0133     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. William H. McNeill, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1-10;
2. also published in William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986), pp. 3-22.
3. McNeill, "Mythistory," p. 7.
4. For an elaboration that perhaps represents what McNeill had in mind for his ecumenical world history, see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (New York, 2003).
5. For the idea of applying the wager to historical study, I acknowledge the inspiration of Sumit Sarkar, "Post-modernism and the Writing of History," Studies in History 15 (1999): 293-322, esp. pp. 308, 322.
6. See also Tzvetan Todorov's "humanist wager" in his Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Casman (Princeton, 2002), especially pp. 226-238.
7. National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards for History (Los Angeles, 1994);
8. and National Standards for History, rev. ed. (Los Angeles, 1996).
9. For a thick description of the debates over national history standards, see Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997).
10. The Fordham Foundation reports are Chester E. Finn Jr. et al., Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know (Washington, D.C., 2003);
11. James Leming, Lucien Ellington, and Kathleen Porter, eds., Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? (Washington, D.C., 2003);
12. and Diane Ravitch, A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks (Washington, D.C., 2004).
13. The Albert Shanker Institute reports are Paul Gagnon, Educating Democracy: State Standards to Ensure a Civic Core (Washington, D.C., 2003);
14. and Elizabeth McPike, Education for Democracy (Washington, D.C., 2003).
15. Taking potshots at high-school textbooks has recently emerged as a favorite activity of the conservative commentators. For two reports that seek to expose problems and errors in world history textbooks, see the Fordham Foundation's study by Ravitch, A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks,
16. and Gilbert T. Sewall's online report, "World History Textbooks: A Review" (New York, 2004), which is available on the Web site of the American Textbook Council.
17. Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World from Paleolithic Times to the Present (New York, 1989, and subsequent editions), p. 4.
18. Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York, 2003), esp. pp. 140-148; quote from pp. 141-142.
19. Apart from Educating Democracy, see several earlier publications: Paul A. Gagnon, Democracy's Untold Story: What World History Textbooks Neglect (Washington, D.C., 1987);
20. "What Should Children Learn?" The Atlantic Monthly (December 1995): 65-78;
21. and "Teaching the West and the World from the Massachusetts Framework," Journal of Education 180 (1998): 67-78.
22. Gagnon, Educating Democracy, p. 21,
23. and Paul A. Gagnon, "Educating Democracy: Are We Up To It?" History Matters! 17:7 (March 2005): 7.
24. Similar formulations appear in Gagnon, "Teaching the West and the World."
25. Gilbert T. Sewall, "The Classroom Conquest of World History," Education Week 20 (13 June 2001): 40.
26. See also Sewall's online report, "Islam and the Textbooks" (New York, 2003), available on the Web site of the American Textbook Council, which levels tendentious and careless attacks on several high-school textbooks in world history because they appear (to Sewall) to be insufficiently critical of Islam. The report appeared under the auspices of the American Textbook Council, a private agency run by Sewall himself and supported by grants from right-wing foundations, Considering this funding and the timing of the report's publication, it is difficult to interpret "Islam and the Textbooks" as anything other than a part of a campaign to vilify Islam for contemporary political (and military) purposes.
27. For a rebuttal of Sewall see Susan Douglass, "The Council of Islamic Education's Response to the American Textbook Council Report, 'Islam and the Textbooks'" (2003), which is available on the Council of Islamic Education Web site.
28. John Patrick Diggins, "History Standards Get It Wrong Again," New York Times (15 May 1996): A-21.
29. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev, ed. (New York, 1998).
30. See Ravitch, The Language Police,
31. and the several pamphlets issued by Lynne V. Cheney during her term as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, particularly American Memory: A Report on the Humanities in the Nation's Public Schools (Washington, D.C., 1987);
32. Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People (Washington, D.C., 1988);
33. and 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students (Washington, D.C., 1989).
34. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992);
35. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1998).
36. For some reflections and variations on this theme, see William H. McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History (Toronto, 1986).
37. For environmental issues see J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000);
38. and Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2004).
39. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995).
40. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
41. Romila Thapar has discussed the Indian government's policy on history education and skillfully exposed its absurdities in two unpublished papers: "In Defence of History" and "The Rewriting of History and Contemporary Politics in India."
42. See also Sumit Sarker, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Bloomington, Ind., 2002);
43. and William Dalrymple, "India: The War over History," New York Review of Books 52:6 (7 April 2005): 62-65.
44. Frances R. A. Paterson, Democracy and Intolerance: Christian School Curricula, School Choice, and Public Policy (Bloomington, Ind., 2003).
45. Terri Koontz, Mark Sidwell, and S. M. Bunker, World Studies for Christian Schools, 2nd ed. (Greenville, S.C., 2000), quoting from pp. 79, 95, 112, and 115 (emphasis in the original). For discussions of imperialism and missionaries, see pp. 340-344, 363-365, 392-396, and 402-403. For the chapter on colonial Africa, see pp. 378-405.
46. George Thompson and Jerry Combee, World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed. (Pensacola, Fla., 1997), quoting from pp. 27, 34-35, 44-45, 47, 79, 91, and 367 (emphasis in the original).
47. Paterson, Democracy and Intolerance.
48. To mention only two important works of many that could be cited, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982);
49. and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
50. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. to date (New York, 1974-1989);
51. Historical Capitalism (London, 1983).
52. For a collection that conveniently brings together the most important of Wallerstein's numerous essays, see The Essential Wallerstein (New York, 2000).
53. For his most recent views on the world system and its future, see World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, N.C., 2004).
54. See particularly Arif Dirlik, "History without a Center? Reflections on Eurocentrism," in Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (Lanham, Md., 2002), pp. 247-284;
55. and "Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What Is World History For?" in Writing World History, 1800-2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford, 2003), pp. 91-133. There is a great deal of overlap and even extensive repetition between these two essays, and indeed also between these two and a series of essays in which Dirlik offers critiques of postcolonial scholarship.
56. See especially the essays collected in two volumes: The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo., 1997)
57. and Postmodernity's Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Lanham, Md., 2000).
58. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. R. Moore (New York, 1989);
59. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
60. See especially "The Global in the Local" in The Postcolonial Aura, pp. 84-104,
61. and "Places and Transcommunality: A Comment on John Brown Childs's Idea of the Transcommunal" in Postmodernity's Histories, pp. 229-236, as well as other essays collected in these two volumes.
62. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (1992): 1-26.
63. Ashis Nandy, "History's Forgotten Doubles," in World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, ed. Philip Pomper, Richard H. Elphick, and Richard T. Vann (Malden, Mass., 1998), pp. 159-178.
64. Vinay Lal, "Provincializing the West: World History from the Perspective of Indian History," in Writing World History, 1800-2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, (Oxford, 2003), pp. 271-289, quoting from pp. 287-288 and pp. 288-289, respectively.
65. There is less cogency, however, in Lal's peroration, which reflects positions urged by Nandy's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, exhorting India to drop out of history altogether by disengaging from the contemporary globalizing world. See Lal, "Provincializing the West," p. 289. Though attempted on several notable occasions in the past, there does not appear to be a truly promising model for such a policy. Meanwhile, the remarkable extent, wealth, prominence, and influence of the contemporary Indian diaspora would seem to complicate if not thoroughly undermine any project to seal India off from the rest of the world.
66. Kristin M. Romey, "Flashpoint Ayodhya," Archaeology 57 (July/ August 2004): 48-55.
67. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
68. See also Ranajit Guha's complementary thoughts about moving beyond Eurocentric historiography: History at the Limits of World-History (New York, 2002).
69. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism," Theory, Culture, and Society 5 (1988): 373-394.
70. Jerry H. Bentley, "World History and Grand Narrative," in Writing World History, 1800-2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford, 2003), pp. 47-65.
71. For two other formulations that are congenial to this view of things, see Johan Goudsblom, E. L. Jones, and Stephen Mennell, Human History and Social Process (Exeter, 1989);
72. and Andrew Sherratt's brilliant essay, "Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long-Term Change," Journal of European Archaeology 3 (1995): 1-32.
73. For two fleshed-out analyses that also are quite congenial to my view, see McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web,
74. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, Calif., 2004).
75. Consider for example the ways events have subverted recent efforts to extrapolate the future from the past and present: see E. L. Jones, "World History and World Forecasting," Journal of World History 5 (1994): 125-138.
76. For only a few particularly thoughtful or notable works among many that have recently addressed these themes, see Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Oxford, 1995);
77. Martha Nussbaum with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed, Joshua Cohen (Boston, 1996);
78. April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London, 2001);
79. Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds., Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2002);
80. and three books by Fred Dallmayr: Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham, Md., 1998);
81. Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham, Md., 2001);
82. and Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York, 2002).
83. See for example two essays by John Obert Voll: "The End of Civilization Is Not So Bad," MESA Bulletin 28 (July 1994): 1-8,
84. and "The Mistaken Identification of 'The West' with 'Modernity,'" American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 13 (1996): 1-12;
85. and Prasenjit Duara's unpublished keynote address for the Third International Conference of Asian Scholars (Singapore, 19-22 August 2003) titled "Crossing Boundaries: A Personal Journey in Asian Research."
86. To mention only a few titles from the many that could serve to substantiate this point, see McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web;
87. Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984);
88. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976);
89. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986);
90. John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 2003);
91. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000);
92. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence;
93. and Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993).