In this course you’ve already learned that history is about interpretation, and what
that means is – asking questions about the past, seeking out evidence to answer those
questions, and making arguments about the past.
So what we’re going to be doing in this lecture is discussing a variety of interpretations
or ways of interpreting the past, and how they speak to and disagree with each other
at times.
So we start by talking about history, the discipline of history, because just like everything
else history has a history and we want to learn where that came from in order to understand
its development over time and how we find ourselves here in the present day.
So professional history is a relatively recent phenomenon; that’s not to say that history
is a relatively recent phenomenon, there are records of storytellers dating back to the
earliest of civilizations and even before there are famous cave paintings that reflect
the daily activities of individuals and in a way that serves as history itself.
So storytelling – history as storytelling – has been part of human culture, human
societies, for millennia.
But professional history emerged in the mid- to late 19th century and it was primarily
the result of the work of man named Leopold Von Ranke, and Ranke wanted to get beyond
just the collection of stories as the basis of history.
What he believed was that history could be professionalized; it could operate according
to a set of principles and a set methodology that could more accurately capture the stories
and meanings of the past.
So the key to Ranke’s approach to history were two things.
Number one, looking at history actually as it was rather than the way we might wish it
had been, and number two, learning about it from sources produced during the period.
So these key principles are principles that we’ve already talked about; they’re the
idea of historical empathy; they’re the idea of evidence-based argumentation and source
analysis.
So historians work from primary sources, and these again are sources produced in the period
by people with knowledge of the topic at hand, and for many of the early years of professional
history these sources included things like diaries or letters or books that were produced
primarily by people in power – because these historians were limited to the sources that
stood the test of time.
Almost all of these sources and almost all of these early histories focused on what we
might call big men, or great men and great ideas – the sort of big picture history,
the history that ‘made the headlines’ to borrow a kind of more modern parlance.
But that record is incomplete because the entire historical record is incomplete.
Not all written records stand the test of time, and not all viewpoints, not all world
views, not all experiences are written down, and so what this means is that different historians
take different approaches to the study of the past, looking at different types of sources,
looking and asking different kinds of questions, and filtering it through different methodological
lenses in order to understand what it’s suggesting about the past.
So the earliest incarnation of this professional history was the history of big ideas, and
it was really this concept that history – the history of the world – is a story of continual
progress, where the world gets better, where great mean and great ideas make the world
better one step at a time.
In the middle of the 20th century, that idea – that basic framework – started to meet
some challenges, and collectively we call these challenges ´ social history’ because
social history really tried to get at the lived experiences of people who weren’t
in the elite, the history of everyday people, and they looked – social historians looked
at things like demographics, which are the elements that structure a population – things
like gender, race, class, religion, ethnicity, or language.
They looked at economic trends.
They look at population patterns – things like immigration, population movement.
They look at the lives of people in urban areas, people who lived in cities, in rural
areas, people who lived in the countryside, and they looked at the social norms, cultural
norms, that structured these populations.
They looked at things like protests and methods of social control, gender and sexual norms,
things that governed the actions of individuals, class consciousness, class conflict, and they
organized the world into these patterns based on something called hegemony and hegemony
is just the strong influence exerted over others by a dominant group.
So hegemony and marginal groups – and marginal groups are the people pushed to the side by
a traditional power structure, people whose voices weren’t necessarily recorded – and
it was in the context of social history that Wallerstein’s world systems theory emerged,
which you’ve already heard about.
This was the idea that world history could be organized by a power relationship rooted
in the core periphery and semi-periphery nations.
But, just like social history challenged traditional history, a new approach to history would emerge
in the 1980s and 1990s that challenged social history.
This new approach to history is called cultural history, and cultural history tries to move
beyond patterns and structures; those are the key elements of social history.
It tries to move beyond these patterns and structures to get at traditions, beliefs,
symbols, attitudes, values, the rituals that a community share that keep them organized
and connected in various ways, and in many cases these elements of cultural history aren’t
necessarily written down.
So they opened up new types of documents to study the written and unwritten rules that
govern a society.
Cultural historians tend to look at the past in terms of three key elements.
One is something called discourse, and discourse is just a word that we use to describe the
language or the ways that people describe the world around them – the words; symbols;
rituals that they use to describe their world view or to describe their environment.
This discourse can be organized into a paradigm and historians – cultural historians – use
the concept of paradigm to get at shared world views, the way that people made sense of the
world around them, the things that they accepted as true with a capital T. These are perceptions,
emotions, fundamental beliefs that are generally held in common by a large group of people.
And then the third element of cultural history is the idea that knowledge is constructed
through discourse and that knowledge is related to power.
So all of these – written and unwritten – rules are organized on the basis, or organized
around the concept, of power – who has power in a society and who doesn’t.
Just like with social history, these shifts changed historians approach to world history;
so you saw social history bring about Wallerstein’s world systems model.
Cultural history would mark a shift to a focus on connections and conflict, these cultural
continuities and dis-continuities that existed as different cultures and different civilizations
came into contact with each other.
Global trade has traditionally been a key source of these connections between different
groups of people in world history, but it wasn’t just economic goods that were traded
along these trade routes – things like religions; customs; languages; diseases; ideas; rituals
and patterns, they were shared unintentionally along these trade routes as well, and as these
ideas, as these cultural norms moved along our trade routes historically, they had impact
on cultures – they had impact on the cultures that they came into contact with.
Sometimes this influence was easily accepted, other times it was much more problematic – resulting
in conflict, and at times violent conflict.
So looking at world history from the perspective of these connections and conflict can help
us understand the way that the world fits together.
It’s not just this sort of random amalgam of different regional or national histories,
but it’s about the interaction between the groups that make up the world.
It is, above all, transregional; transnational; and transcultural.
One particular concept of cultural history that we will return to again and again in
this course is gender history, and gender history is just a way of looking at the past
by examining the way that gender norms and concepts of gender – of femininity and masculinity
– structure the worlds that we study.
Traditionally, gender history has focused on the role of women – beginning just with
the story of exceptional women, women who made a name for themselves in a male-dominated
world – think Elizabeth the First, or Olympe de Gouges; these were women who stood out
in the past.
That’s evolved over time to focus a study on women’s roles – either within or outside
of traditional structures – so women’s roles within family, within the workplace,
within childrearing.
This posited - this gave way to a belief that gender could be separated from sex, and that
gender was something that was constructed, where sex was a biological imperative, and
so historians had begun to examine the ways in which cultures defined – the different
ways – in which cultures defined femininity and masculinity.
It typically results in a binary – and binary is just a clear division into two distinct
categories – and with that binary comes a power structure.
Most often this power structure is a patriarchy in which men were dominant, but not always,
and binary was on occasion in flux.
So what does this mean for our study of world civilizations?
It means that you’re going to hear three historians presenting different topics of
connection and conflict between world groups, and we’re not always going to agree with
each other about what they mean – and that’s okay.
In fact, it’s good – because it’s what historians do; they make argument, they listen
to evidence, and they make room to be convinced to change their mind in the light of good
evidence.
So think about that as we move forward into our discussions of the various topics in world
history for this course.
Thank you.