0.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind  (Page 5/7)

So here we have an initial answer to the question posed by Glyn Daniel. In the centuries leading up to the time revolution of 1859, human history was whole and genealogical. In the decades following the time revolution, the subject of history was fragmented along disciplinary lines. Nowadays, history is housed in at least two departments, History and Anthropology. Disciplines, much like cubist paintings, take a unified subject and fracture it on methodological lines. Where the subject of human history is concerned, the methodological division doubles as a chronological division. Archaeologists and anthropologists take responsibility for the Great Before. Historians limit themselves to the Everything After. Despite the enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity these past few decades, there has been very little thought devoted to bringing interdisciplinarity to the study of human history.

Accompanying the disciplinary turn was the well-known shift in subject from the genealogy of kings and battles to the rise of nations. The genealogical mode of writing history used by Gregory of Tours and others is a style of thinking that naturally creates an interest in “first things.” The new mode of history writing that emerged in the later nineteenth century, in sharp contrast, was historically myopic. Metaphorically, it took the form of what biologists would call an ontogeny: a developmental history describing the birth and maturation of a single organism. Where a genealogy describes the deep history of a lineage, an ontogeny writes the biography of a single entity cut adrift from its lineage. The new mode of history writing, in this vein, took form as the biography of nations, a fitting subject for an age that saw the rise of nationalism and the emergence of universal education. Through the metaphor of ontogeny, it became possible to imagine that national histories have founding moments and key transitions. Surveying the histories written in France, England, the United States, and elsewhere in the West in the decades leading up to 1900, it is striking how histories written in a semi-genealogical mode gave way, over the space of several decades, to histories rife with metaphors of origin and birth. In general, see Ernest Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern , 2 ^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The shift in patterns of historical writing, and in particular the transformation in the underlying biological metaphors used to describe the pattern of history, merit further research. For a preliminary study, see my “Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins,” forthcoming.

All national history curricula have their own roots in the late nineteenth century, in the work of figures like Victor Duruy, George Park Fisher, and other historians who were instrumental in defining the patterns of history instruction. It is understandable that history curricula, then as now, should emphasize moments of national origins. Nations, after all, are bodies. But leaving aside nations, what was the birth date for history as a whole? In the first half of the twentieth century, this was an issue of some moment in the United States, as many universities adopted “Western Civ” as their basic history course. In the 1920s, the Australian archaeologist Gordon Childe offered historians the twin ideas of the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia, and his style of periodization spread rapidly through U.S. textbooks, general histories, and curricula from the 1930s onward. The current Social Studies curriculum in New York State, for example, begins officially in Mesopotamia in 4,000 B.C. In Texas, no dates are given for some of the early happenings, but the earliest subject covered is the “Neolithic Agricultural Revolution.” See (External Link) , page 94, accessed 28 December 2009; Texas Administrative Code, Title 19, Part II, Chapter 113, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies, Subchapter C, High School, p. C-15; see (External Link) , accessed 11 September 2009. In almost all Western Civ and World History textbooks today, history comes into being in the Neolithic.