Cal Berkeley economic historian Brad DeLong describes history as it was long taught in the Euro-centric world like this:
[T]here was a time in the 1800s when people wanted to tell the Story of Civilization as something like an Olympic-torch relay race:
The flint is struck and the torch lit in the Uruk of Gilgamesh and in Ur of the Chaldees.
It is then passed down to the Pharaohs of Egypt and to the Babylon of Hammurabi.
It winds up in the hands of Kings Dawid and Salomo of Jerusalem.
The torch is then passed—perhaps through Kurush and the other Loyal-Spirit Great Kings of the Persian Empire—to Athens!
And then on to Rome!
And conquering Rome is then conquered by Jerusalem and Galilee, as the torch is carried forward!
And so on. In the aftermath of the fall of Rome, barbarian invasions and western Christendom then meld themselves into European feudal civilization, which picks up the torch. The torch is handed off to the Renaissance. The Reformation, The Enlightenment rise of representative government and common-law systems: governments that exist to secure people’s natural rights and that derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Then the British Industrial Revolution. And on to modern democratic capitalism, or capitalist democracy.
This wasn't exactly what was shoveled at me in high school in the 1960s, but there certainly were strong strains of it. I'm pretty sure that not even Ron DeSantis is promoting exactly this in Florida today -- but I also suspect that the sanitized, white-centric history he wants to enforce derives from this.
If you were exposed to any world history in school, how much did it resemble this description? What has changed? What remains the same?
By the way, DeLong is having none of it:
But this is like picking out pictures of things you like in a photograph and claiming that they are “yours”.
Image via The Guardian.
4 comments:
My first lesson in human history occurred tramping around the woods near the river. I found a rock with a hole drilled through it that was used to fish salmon. Dad, a fisheries biologist and lover of history began explaining the culture and lives of the indigenous people who used to live there.
What a wonderful introduction to people who came before!
I too was fortunate to have a parent who cared about history in a somewhat sophisticated way -- I was taken along as a child to spend a few days at an archeological dig at Old Fort Niagara where very serious scholars were pulling out native and French artifacts over 400 years old. Old for this continent anyway. I learned this was a highly structured, systematic pursuit.
But I do think my high school history derived from a frame rather like what DeLong references here. I chafed and they invented independent study so I could study the history of Africa -- still largely imperial, but broadening. :-)
History is not static. New discoveries are always being made. That's a fairly straightforward narrative, but pared down. Of course, other cultures developed parallel to Europe, and the last 500 years have been the story of Europe interacting with the rest of the world.
I don't know if you've heard of this book, but it shows how Christianity extended much beyond West Asia and Europe.
Hi Brandon: I have indeed read a good deal by Philip Jenkins. We only think Christianity is a European religion by erasing its extent in what we call the Middle East, Asia, Africa and beyond. To our loss of perspective.
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