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Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor
 
 
 
Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006


Volume VII, Number 5

--Mark M. Smith, "Sensing Race, Sensing History"
--James E. McWilliams, "Cuisine and National Identity in the Early Republic"
--W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "Southern Memories"
--An Interview with Richard Vinen [Full Text]

--PROGRESS IN HISTORY? A FORUM
--Bruce Mazlish, "Progress in History"
--David Christian, "Progress: Directionality or Betterment?"
--J.C.D. Clark, "Progress as Parochialism"
--Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "Progress in History"
--Aviezer Tucker, "Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish"
--Bruce Mazlish, "Rejoinder"

--Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen, "Reagan and the West: How Jeffersonian Ideals Reached the 40th President"
--Timothy S. Huebner, "Looking Backward: The Southern Manifesto of 1956" 
--Jeremy Black, "The Public Use of History" [Full Text]
--Letters
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Sensing Race, Sensing History
Mark M. Smith

On March 6, 1907 white residents of Albany, Georgia, ran Peter Zeigler out of town.  Zeigler “had been here for a month and palmed himself off as a white man.” Citizens had been fooled, even at close quarter: “He has been boarding with one of the best white families in the city and has been associating with some of Albany’s best people.” Luck failed Zeigler, it seemed, when “[a] visiting lady recognized him as being a Negro who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated and found to be correct.” But Zeigler returned to Albany “accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential friends from his native state of South Carolina” who verified that he was, in fact, white. Peter Zeigler went from being white to black to white because his “race” could not be reliably fixed.

Instances of “black” people passing into “white” society, of whites mistakenly tagging black people as white (or, indeed, taking whites for blacks) are rife in southern history. And it is surely tempting to frame such instances as illustrating the fundamentally illogical system of segregation, one premised on the putative absolute difference between “black” and “white.” But there is more to this matter than, literally, meets the eye. To end analysis with the observation that the Peter Zeigler episode and others like it reveal the operational and intellectual instability of race in a period that touted the necessity and existence of racial permanence begs too many pivotal questions. How did such a system recover from such episodes? How did it function for over half a century if it was so fragile, illogical, and built on a distinction that was itself a fiction? . . . .

Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His latest book, from which this essay is drawn, is How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society
 

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Groping for National Identity by Forging a National Cuisine
James E. McWilliams

The first generation of white Americans to come of age after the American Revolution had to perform a cultural balancing act. On the one hand, it had to forge a unique identity, one that disassociated the new republic from timeworn habits. The process of establishing a national persona was multifaceted and not easily summarized, but in general it required Americans to embrace the most conspicuous difference between their nascent society and the established customs of the motherland: the comparative “wildness” of the American environment. Charles Woodmason, an itinerant minister working in the 1750s, did more than echo empty rhetoric when he described himself as negotiating “the Wild Woods of America.” For better or worse, he highlighted early America’s roughhewn environment as its most telling point of distinction from Great Britain, which had effectively served as a prevailing role model.

On the other hand, though, while young Americans eagerly sought to highlight the wooly virtues of their mythical frontier, they had to do so without tipping their praise too far in the “culture of wilderness” direction. An overzealous advocacy of the “Wild Woods,” after all, would have risked endorsing the worldview of the “savages”—the indigenous population that Anglo-Americans worked so diligently to dispossess and banish. To be sure, urgent political and diplomatic matters animated public life in the early republic—writing a constitution, staying out of war, fighting a war, avoiding secession, to name a few examples—and they all contributed to the process of national identity construction. But the pervasive challenge of juggling European refinement and Native American primitiveness persisted as an ongoing if subtle cultural concern that, in one way or another, touched the lives of every white American.  The threat of going native, balanced against the threat of falling into overcivilized luxury, consistently tempered early Americans’ efforts to conceptualize their national character.

While scholarly approaches to understanding this dilemma are potentially endless, American culinary habits provide an especially clear lens through which to capture early Americans struggling with this important cultural negotiation. By the time of the American Revolution, America’s diverse culinary landscape had coalesced into a rough but vaguely definable “American” mode of eating. Intensely regional cuisines, whose differences were further intensified by racial and ethnic contributions—not to mention radically different environmental conditions—had gently converged by the early 19th century. They did so under the influence of increasing coastal trade and a homogenizing consumer revolution that started to standardize material life, especially in the kitchen. These factors eventually helped early Americans pioneer a diet based on what they saw as the frontier virtues of simplicity, self-sufficiency, pragmatism, and a measured lack of pretension. By the early 19th century American cookbooks, while not necessarily pouring off the presses, were nonetheless becoming useful items in American kitchens and, more importantly, offering middle class women accessible recipes written, as a popular example put it, “in the American mode” . . . .

James E. McWilliams is assistant professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos. A past winner of the Whitehill Prize in Colonial History awarded by the New England Quarterly for the best essay of the year, he is the author of A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Puritan Pioneers: Economy and Society in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming). 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Southern Memories
W. Fitzhugh Brundage

In 2000 an extended controversy erupted in Caroline County, Virginia, after the board of supervisors refused to approve a proposed black history monument to be erected in the county’s courthouse square. Several supervisors objected to the monument’s commemoration of Gabriel’s Rebellion, a failed slave revolt in 1800 that ended with the execution of dozens of alleged conspirators, including its purported leader, Gabriel Prosser. The supervisors subsequently rejected a proposal to commemorate Mildred and Richard Loving, a local interracial couple whose 1957 conviction for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage was overturned ten years later by a landmark United State Supreme Court decision. Proponents of the monument then turned to the NAACP, claiming that their equal-protection guarantees as citizens had been violated by the county board, which imposed standards on the black history monument that had not been applied to previous monuments, including the Confederate memorial that towered over the courthouse square.

The outlines of the controversy suggest a familiar contest between African Americans insistent upon drawing attention to the South’s troubled past and whites equally intent on using their inherited power to avoid doing so. Certainly, one outspoken advocate of the Prosser monument saw herself as a crusader for truth in the face of willful ignorance. “Until we accept Gabriel,” she insisted, “we accept the myth that slaves were content with their condition, had no interest in freedom and were not entitled to it.” The chairman of the tourism committee, who originally proposed the monument, contended that a monument to celebrate African-American history was needed to balance out the tributes to the Confederacy that dotted the landscape.  Opponents also stood on principle, insisting that the monument glorified violence and inflamed racial tensions. One of the county supervisors explained, “We should have no part as a county in glorifying someone who wanted to kill whites and kidnap the governor.”

The flap in Caroline County highlights the complexities of debates over the southern past. There was broad local support for memorializing African-American heritage, but residents divided over the appropriateness of recognizing a planned revolt that only tangentially involved residents of Caroline County. At the same time, some residents opposed undue recognition of the antislavery activism of white Quakers because it threatened to overshadow the more furtive yet arguably more heroic resistance of the enslaved. Nor were the racial lines in the controversy clearly drawn. One of the monument’s most ardent champions was a white Alabamian who had moved to the county after achieving prominence in the national anti-abortion movement.  Another supporter, one of the supervisors who voted for the monument, was a white man who represented a majority black district. Meanwhile, a leading opponent of the monument was an African American elected by a majority white district to the board of supervisors.

This contretemps is only one example of the memory wars that have erupted in the American South during the past several decades. Given the heat generated by many of these controversies, both journalists and, more recently, scholars have shown an interest in tracing their historical origins and effects . . . . 

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
An Interview with Richard Vinen
Conducted by Joseph S. Lucas

Richard Vinen, reader in history at King’s College London, has written several books and articles about 20th-century Europe, including The Politics of French Business, 1936-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991; new ed., 2002), The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (Allen Lane, 2006), and A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Little Brown, 2000). Joseph Lucas interviewed Vinen in February 2006, mostly about the extraordinarily wide-ranging account of 20th-century Europe Vinen offers in History and Fragments. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Nation, Vinen spoke to Lucas from Houston, Texas, where he will be spending much of the next three years. 

Joseph Lucas: What would you like readers to take away from A History in Fragments

Richard Vinen: The standard view of 20th-century Europe casts the first half of the century as an apocalypse—the two World Wars, Stalinism, and the Nazis. The postwar period comes across as a time of relative optimism. Further, historians—especially since the 1980s—tend to break up the second half of the 20th century into two or three sub-periods. The key here is Eric Hobsbawm’s argument that there was a golden age from 1945 to 1975 and then a collapse from the late 1970s on. I offer a less optimistic reading of the immediate postwar period. The golden age, in my view, was not quite so golden. It was tied up with exploitation, with great social trauma—even in the prosperous Western European countries—and it was a horrible time for Eastern Europeans. And the post-1975 period, which Hobsbawm sees as the Thatcherite triumph of capitalism, I see as a more complicated time, a period characterized by the triumph of different kinds of freedoms, not just economic liberal freedom. The fall of communism made Europe a much more exciting and hopeful place. I wrote the book largely in Prague in 1997-98, so it has a certain amount of that perspective in it. 

Lucas: What are some of the most widely held misconceptions about the history of 20th-century Europe? 

Vinen: My strongest objection is to the notion that the 20th century was a particularly horrific century or, alternatively, a particularly progressive century. Different centuries are impossible to compare. How do you compare the 14th century with the 20th century? How do you compare the Black Death with the Holocaust? These are fundamentally incomparable things. It’s very hard to give the 20th century an identity at all. 

Lucas: You stress the diverse and “fragmentary nature” of the European experience in the 20th century. Is this true for all past societies and eras, or does it apply especially to 20th-century Europe?

Vinen: In one sense, societies of the past were even more fragmented—divisions of language, national frontiers, and simple distance counted for more.  In another sense, they were more united in that most people’s lives revolved around the harsh realities of an agricultural year. The very rapid technological change of the last few years brings people together in some ways, but the Internet and satellite television also create the possibility of ever more complicated forms of identity.

Lucas: How did educated Western Europeans in 1900 think about Europe and its place in history and the wider world? How do Europeans today think about these matters? 

Vinen: Part of the answer is that educated Europeans (one should not forget that this group was much more select in 1900 than it is today) thought more about both history and Europe in 1900 than they do now. This varies a bit from country to country—in France, big-time politicians write books on Joan of Arc or Napoleon and do so in the expectation that readers will see the implications of such work for contemporary politics; in Britain, politicians hardly ever mention even the recent past. In addition to this, Europeans in 1900 thought of the past in terms of a very long perspective. Many of them would have traced “European civilization” right back to classical antiquity. Now historical perspective is much more limited and tends to be focused on the Second World War and events since then.

Lucas: Will Western European nations ever again go to war against each other? 

Vinen: No.

Lucas: Why is it safe to assume a peaceful Western European future? 

Vinen: In part, it’s simply instinct. Of course, you could say this is a very naive instinct and that one of the reasons why I’m confident of this is because I travel in Western Europe. I spend half of my life in France. It seems to me inconceivable that Britain would ever go to war with France again. Some people might say that if you’d been living in Britain before the First World War, you would have had a similar feeling of well being with regard to the Germans. And surely conflict can erupt between countries that see themselves as fairly similar and appear to have good relations. 

But I think there are good reasons why Western Europe is never going to fight again. All sorts of Western European institutions are now so interlocked that in some ways it’s no longer meaningful to talk about European countries as different nations anymore. One could argue that Germany after 1870 was less integrated than Western Europe is now. How people plan careers, how people obtain their education, how European foreign policy is conducted—this all involves a high degree of international coordination. Members of the French ruling class almost all speak fluent English and have spent at least part of their education in either Britain or America.

There is nothing obvious that people would fight about. Most interests now are ones that link Europe together, and this would equally be true of America. We forget how incredibly close the West is in terms of the way we see the world and our interests and so on. And by the West, I really mean something stretching from the United States through the countries of Central Europe and, to a lesser extent, Russia and the industrialized countries of Asia. When you hear members of the American Republican Party talk about France, you would think France is a dangerous enemy of the United States. But actually, of course, any French politician would agree on 99% of issues with any American politician.

And Europeans who attack America are in reality consumers of all sorts of aspects of American culture. They use American software on their computers. They go to America a great deal. (One of the great paradoxes of the late 20th century was the left-wing European academic who spent much of his time teaching in the United States. I’ve often thought that Kissinger or someone dreamed up a wicked CIA strategy to neuter the European Left by employing them all at UCLA.) To hear European left-wingers talk about George Bush, you’d think they were talking about Adolph Hitler. I’ve heard Europeans seriously say that they think there is very little difference between Saddam Hussein and George Bush. It’s just statistically not true. We know how many people Saddam Hussein killed—if you count every capital punishment carried out in Texas, it’s a tiny fraction of that number. But I don’t think the European Left is seriously going to constitute itself upon an aggressively anti-American basis.

Equally, I think in America there is an element of falsity. And I’m quite sure that plenty of Republicans who make those speeches about France are people who are perfectly happy to go to Paris. And there are French soldiers fighting in Afghanistan at this very moment. There is a real, tangible alliance between these two countries. 

Lucas: In History in Fragments you mention the pre-World War I elite’s disdain for the masses. How did democracy come to be embraced by so many Europeans by the end of the 20th century? Has America served as a model? 

Vinen: Democracy has been embraced for various reasons and at varying times (remember that France gave men the vote in the 19th century but did not enfranchise women until 1945, and many European countries—Spain, Portugal, and Greece as well as the communist countries of the East—were undemocratic in the early 1970s). So much of Europe’s attachment to democracy and liberalism springs from a reaction against Nazism and Stalinism. And one key lesson of the 20th century is that democracy seems to work. Many of its opponents presented their ideas as “efficient,” but democracies have produced quicker economic growth than dictatorships and have proved better at winning wars.

As for America being a model: she provided vast material resources that helped defeat Nazism, contain communism, and rebuild European industry. She did these things without taking a square inch of territory and without disputing the rights of Western European governments to make their own decisions. However, in terms of values, I am less sure that America was the model. Europeans admire American efficiency and dynamism but have always been worried by aspects of the U.S.—for example, even the British, not always the most tolerant people, were appalled by the racial segregation of the American army in the Second World War.

Lucas: Is there more social fluidity now in England than there was in the early 1950s? 

Vinen: Much of the social mobility in the 1950s involved people like my father, who was born into a lower middle class background, was very good at doing exams, and won a scholarship to go to university. At the same time, a member of the upper class, who had been born in an era where educational privilege was very much reserved for his class, would also have had a strong sense of social fluidity: he was suddenly confronted by a group of people born to less privileged backgrounds challenging or coming alongside him. In the 1950s social fluidity affected only certain people. It affected men more than women, it affected people who were already relatively privileged, and especially people who had access to education—my father’s father was a teacher. Nowadays social fluidity is increasingly associated with other issues, namely gender and race. In Britain now it looks as if the white male working class is the most hopeless class to be born into.

The 1960s was a time of great pessimism on the part of the English upper middle class; they were troubled by what they saw as both national and social decline. The ruling class had lost its way; there were no servants anymore; and Britain no longer ruled an empire. One of the curious things now, though, is that the elite in a country like Britain probably feels more confident today than in the 1950s. The possibility of making enormous sums of money if you’re born into the upper middle class is much higher now than it was in the 1950s. The chance of having all your money taken away by income tax is much lower. In some ways—and I wouldn’t want to overstate this—it feels as if a kind of Edwardian social system is being reconstituted. Servants are on the rise again. To be sure, members of the British upper middle class don’t have butlers anymore. But, on the other hand, many of them now have nannies raising their children. Society has not exactly moved backward, but it has moved in ways that make privilege seem less threatened now than it did in the 1950s. For instance, it looked in the 1970s as if private schools were going to be abolished in Britain. That seems inconceivable today, and private education can probably provide a greater advantage now than ever before. Although, of course, the definition of who belongs to the upper middle classes is changing, in the sense that women are much more part of it—as active, money earning participants—than they were in the 1950s. 

Lucas: Could you speak to the pleasures of writing recent history? 

Vinen: It’s immensely pleasurable in that one feels—I think almost certainly wrongly—that one is making a contribution to current political debate. Also there is the sense of living through events and knowing about things from sources other than academic reading—simply seeing places has a huge effect on how one perceives history. Although one thinks of Europe as this very ancient place, you’ve got to remember that several European cities were destroyed in the Second World War. Much of what one sees in Europe is a product of the recent past. I always feel that it must be very difficult for medievalists to reconstruct what life was like for people and how they felt. In certain respects it’s easier for a historian of contemporary times to do that—easier for me to imagine what it was like even to be a dissident in Eastern Europe in the early 1970s than for a historian to imagine himself as a medieval peasant. 

Lucas: How about some of the pitfalls? 

Vinen: I think one always exaggerates the importance of events one has lived through oneself. And there are all sorts of things I’d do differently if I rewrote History in Fragments. For instance, I would cut down the amount I wrote about the last ten years of the 20th century. I talked about it too much and in an excessively vague and journalistic way, which is an inevitable professional deformation of writing about one’s own time. 

Lucas: What else would you do differently if you were writing History in Fragments now instead of in the late 1990s?

Vinen: I wouldn’t change my general approach, although I’d obviously make certain things more specific and more explicit. The book was published in the United States in September 2001. So one of the key questions not addressed in the book is: Did the world change in September 2001? My blunt answer is: no. If it changed at all, it changed for the inhabitants of Pakistan or Baghdad, the places that really are on the front line of what’s going on now, rather than the inhabitants of Europe or even those of the United States.

One of things historians do, which is obviously a difficult thing to do and which can arouse great outrage, is to put things in context. On September 11, 2001 the number of people killed in historical terms was very, very small. It wasn’t a turning point in the way that the First World War was a turning point. In the 1970s terrorism in Europe was always overstated. I remember, even though I was a child in the 1970s, that there was a period when Europeans were enormously frightened by terrorism—the British with the IRA, the Italians with the Red Brigade. People thought things were falling apart. But that never happened. The number of people killed by terrorists in Northern Ireland each year was always less than the number of people killed in traffic accidents. So I think one ought to keep that in perspective—there’s a limit to how dramatically one should react.

The most obvious weakness of History in Fragments is how little it engages with the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, especially Europe and the non-industrialized world. It says quite a lot about Europe and America but very little about Europe and Africa, Europe and Asia. When I was writing the book, I was very bored by the idea of decolonization, which dominates conventional accounts of 20th-century Europe. I feel there is not a great deal to be said about that. You know, it happened. In retrospect I wish I’d thought of some different way to talk about the changing relationship between Europe and the Third World, one that addressed immigration, ethnic change in Western Europe itself—the fact that Western Europe was becoming very ethnically mixed at the same time that Eastern Europe was becoming ethnically homogeneous—and changes within the former colonies. A lot of what people talk about as decolonization has actually to do with other sorts of conflict; not only conflicts between the imperial powers and the colonies, but also conflicts between different groups within the colonized countries.

Lucas: What about post-imperial immigration from the former colonies to Europe? 

Vinen: It has changed the nature of Europe, particularly Britain and France. Different countries have responded to it in different ways. The French have an idea of citizenship based on culture and an acceptance of certain common values. The Germans have much more of a racial definition of citizenship. The British definition of citizenship almost revolves around the idea that there is no definition of citizenship. In the last year or so British politicians have started to talk about the need to create a common patriotic culture. Some of the more intelligent commentators have said that what is characteristically British is the refusal to have a common patriotic culture and instead to maintain a rather loose and deliberately ambiguous notion of what it is to be British.

Without question, immigration has challenged these ideas about what makes up citizenship. Further, there is a relationship between colonization and the idea of a country’s role in the world, which I think is one of the great issues that Britain has never confronted. Britain has always managed to imply that losing an empire didn’t change its role in the world, whereas in reality it did. Immigration has also changed our view of history. The single most complicated fact for a historian of modern Britain or modern France is that a quarter of the population has grandparents who were born outside the country. Our history goes back to Calcutta or Algiers as much at it stays within the national frontiers.

Lucas:There is the notion of a continuum from a collective ideal of nationality in continental Europe to an individualistic, liberal ideal embodied most in America and then, across the Atlantic, in Britain. According to this view, America has the easiest time dealing with immigration, while continental Europe has the most trouble. Is there any truth to this? 

Vinen: I’m skeptical about that. First, I think that the last few months (especially seen from my present home in Houston) raise big questions about whether America is any kind of model in dealing with immigration. I get the sense that this is still a society with big and unpleasant racial divisions. You could drive around Houston for a long time before you saw anyone other than a Mexican doing a laboring job. The Americans seem to me to be in denial about the role of race in their society.

As for Europe, Britain is a special case. Britons rarely talk about British identity in an explicit way. There’s a sense that national identity is something that has a formal meaning in terms of a passport, but often no particular cultural meaning. In the 19th century Britain fought a war over Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew who had acquired a British passport in an almost accidental way. But in the British point of view, if you’ve got a British passport, you’re entitled to protection by the British navy, which I’ve always thought a rather admirable part of British national identity. What we’ve never really done is sorted out whether people have to earn the right to belong to Britain by integrating into a national culture. Yet I would still argue that the British model of deliberate flexibility and ambiguity has something to recommend it.

In continental Europe it’s different. You can’t know how the French model, which is the one that seems to be in great crisis at the moment, is going to work out. In one sense, France has been very successful at assimilating immigrants. For most of the 20th century France was the only European country that took in large numbers of immigrants—Poles, Italians, and, more recently, Arabs. I think the jury is still out on whether problems with immigration in France are related to broader problems with Islam.

Lucas: Are you optimistic with regard to how things will play out in Europe with regard to Muslims and immigration? 

Vinen: I am, actually. Europe is a very secular place, which ought to be an advantage. Europe has always involved different cultures, which at times has produced horrific conflict, but at other times has not. You’ve got to remember that large parts of Central Europe saw relatively peaceful cohabitation between Muslims and non-Muslims for hundreds of years. In London I deal with Muslims every day of my life, maybe ten times a day. I buy my coffee and a newspaper every morning from a newsstand run by Muslims. The vast majority of these relationships are completely unproblematic. We shouldn’t get too excited about the idea that there is some kind of great crisis.

Lucas: What are you working on now? 

Vinen: I have a book coming out in the UK in April (out in the U.S. in September) called the Unfree French, which is about France during the Second World War. And currently I’m shifting direction. So far I’ve been a historian of either France or continental Europe, but now I’m going to become a historian of Britain. I plan to write a book called English Exceptions about the ways in which England is a peculiar place, particularly how it differs from continental Europe. Also, I must say that in just the last two or three days I’ve thought it would be insane to live in Texas for three years and not try to do something on American history, but I’m not at all sure what. 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
PROGRESS IN HISTORY? A FORUM*

Notions of progress and teleology have been all but banished from contemporary historical interpretation. But those historians who examine the past in large chunks seemingly cannot avoid the obvious: the past reveals a general trajectory of increasing social and economic complexity. Discussions of evolutionary biology encounter the same tensions between contingency and directionality. Can historians legitimately incorporate notions of complexity and directionality without taking on the unwanted baggage of progress? We asked Historically Speaking contributing editor Bruce Mazlish, who with Leo Marx edited a volume a decade ago on Progress: Fact or Illusion? to explore these issues. A panel of distinguished scholars—David Christian, Jonathan Clark, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Aviezer Tucker—responds, followed by Mazlish’s rejoinder.

*This forum is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Progress in History
Bruce Mazlish

The subject of “Progress in History” is one that branches out in many directions. To start with it, is helpful to divide the topic into two parts. On one side, we need to talk about progress in history, in the sense of disciplinary advancement. On another side, the main part of the discussion to follow, we need to talk about progress in human history, i.e., results, contested though they are, of this advance as shown according to the progress of the discipline itself. In other words, we can talk about progress, that is, advance in the conditions of humanity, only in the light of the discipline of history’s achievement of greater mastery of both the empirical and theoretical aspects of the subject.

History as a discipline has become highly sophisticated in regard to the use of archival materials and their interpretation in the light of theories from other fields, especially the social and natural sciences. All sorts of subfields, ranging from micro to big history, from cultural to multicultural history, from environmental to global history, are flourishing. They enable us to pose the question of progress in history, in the second sense that I have posited, in a more sophisticated and complex manner than hitherto.1

Before going further, however, I want to look more closely at the idea of progress . . . . 

Bruce Mazlish is professor of history at MIT. He is the author of The Uncertain Sciences (Yale University Press, 1998).

1 As is evident, I am bypassing questions of objectivity, reality, narrative, meta-narrative and so forth that would occupy a philosopher of history. They do not affect the point I am making here.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Progress: Directionality or Betterment? 
David Christian

Progress: the idea “that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction” (J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth [Macmillan, 1920], 2).

Progress: “the idea that history is a record of improvement in the conditions of human life” (Leo Marx and Bruch Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? [University of Michigan Press, 1996], 1).

The idea of “progress” contains two separable components. The first is the notion of directionality. The English word “progress” comes from the Latin progressus, a going or stepping forward.1 The etymology implies that each forward movement depends on previous steps. In this limited sense, the idea of “progress” refers to the existence of a rationally comprehensible directionality in human history.

The sense of forward movement helps explain the second element in the idea of “progress”: a movement toward betterment. This sense puts a subjective and ethical loading onto the simple idea of directionality. Early in the 17th century Francis Bacon had already brought these two meanings together. He insisted that human knowledge of the world had increased, and that this increase in knowledge could and should be used to improve human life. History, in short, had a direction, and that direction pointed toward betterment. Enlightenment thinkers picked up this double-barreled definition of progress with great enthusiasm, and by the 19th century the idea of progress held a strategic position within the human sciences.2 Writing in the early 20th century, Bury described the “doctrine of Progress” as “the animating and controlling idea of western civilization.”3 In acquiring this ethical loading, the word progress followed the path of other words such as evolution and civilization, both of which were pressed into service to express the Enlightenment sense of history as betterment.

As a first step toward clarifying the idea of progress, it is vital to separate its two component meanings. We can show many forms of directionality in human (as in biological and cosmological) history. However, we know of no universally accepted criteria for evaluating those trends. Directionality is an objective concept that can be tested empirically. Progress is a mythic idea, one that raises ethical rather than empirical questions . . . .

David Christian is professor of history at San Diego State University. He is author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004). 

1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana, 1976), 205-7.

2 I use the phrase “human sciences” as it is used in Bruce Mazlish, The Uncertain Sciences (Yale University Press, 1998).

3 J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (Macmillan, 1920), vii; there is a good synopsis of the history of the idea of progress in Bruce Mazlish, “Progress: A Historical and Critical Perspective,” in Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? (University of Michigan Press, 1996), 29-32.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Progress as Parochialism
J. C. D. Clark 

In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes gave an account of his assumptions about human nature: “the Felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.” Not only did desires continually extend to new things; men were also tormented about defending what they had. Power was necessary to secure what had already been won, but this, too, was involved in an endless regression. Consequently, “I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.”1

With devastating candor, Hobbes went at once to the heart of the problem. People are never satisfied: once they have attained a goal, they change their goals. What they have achieved, they fear losing; what they have not achieved consumes them with desire. Within such a worldview, progress, conceived as the incremental and satisfying attainment of stable and ultimate ends, was not a self-evident truth. People who think they have won the argument by saying “progress is real, but it is not inevitable” have forgotten their Hobbes.

The shifting nature of ultimate ends is a familiar historical lesson. In the 16th century, state churches were hardly reformed along Protestant lines when many of their members decided that they wished to worship in “gathered churches,” rejecting the state church ideal. In the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was divided into secular republics; soon, many of their citizens decided that they would rather live in theocratic states, consciously rejecting a “modernity” now perceived as a Western imposition. Examples need not be multiplied.

The concept of “progress” was therefore constructed, like any other concept. A story of its origins was often projected back onto 17th- and 18th-century Britain, whose history was subtly misrepresented as a result. True, people then increasingly used the term “improvement,” but this was a parochial notion and was not generalized into an overall theory except for very special reasons. Yet the ideology of “progress” was eventually coined, and has sometimes been internalized by the very people—the historians—who ought to stand back from it and locate it as a historical formation . . . . 

Jonathan Clark is Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas. His books include Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism, and History (Stanford University Press, 2004).

1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiaticall and Civil (London, 1651), Part I, ch. XI.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Progress in History
Robert E. Lucas, Jr.

Of course there is progress in history. Why so many people talk and write as though there were something difficult about this question is simply beyond me. Do they believe that to admit the obvious—that people as a whole are getting better off over time—will make us indifferent to the problems that still exist or blind us to environmental and other potential threats? I would imagine the opposite: the progress we see for so many millions makes it ever harder to claim that no progress is possible on the problems that remain. What we need to do about progress as historians and social scientists is not to deny its existence but describe it, accurately and in detail; try to understand its character and its sources; and learn how to make the most of it . . . .

Nobel Laureate Robert E. Lucas, Jr. is the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Lectures on Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2002). 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish
Aviezer Tucker 

Bruce Mazlish notes correctly that there is enormous conceptual confusion over contingency, necessity, teleology, and progress in history. I hope to clarify some of these confusions. The related concepts of contingency and necessity are independent of teleology, and teleology and progress are independent of each other as well . . . . 
 

Aviezer Tucker teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and other books and articles on the philosophy of history, epistemology, and social and political philosophy. He is writing a book entitled Origins on the inference of common causes in biology, history, textual criticism, and comparative linguistics.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Rejoinder 
Bruce Mazlish

Have the responses to my “Progress in History” advanced the discussion? After all, the piece was intended to evoke such a possibility, and was written with that aim in mind. I am pleased to say that David Christian’s comment has done just that. He has either extended or clarified some of the points made in my essay (while kindly overlooking any needed corrections). He has very wisely emphasized the need to distinguish between the questions of directionality and of betterment, instancing Francis Bacon as one who in the 17th century sought to bring the two meanings together . . . . 

End of Forum
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Reagan and the West: How Jeffersonian Ideals Reached the 40th President
Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen

Ronald Reagan made just a few Westerns in a Hollywood career that spanned four decades and included leading roles in some fifty films. Yet in the perception of his own country and throughout the world (he was called “Ronnie Le Cowboy” in the French press), Reagan became synonymous with the Western film genre. It was not his cinematic career that sealed the association in the public mind, but his final significant role before leaving entertainment for politics as host of the popular early 1960s television series Death Valley Days. Yet Reagan relished the misconception that he was a Western star; he wore cowboy boots and a Stetson hat while entertaining on his mountaintop California ranch. The West, as understood in film and fiction rather than in history, was inseparable from Reagan’s persona. It was also a source for many of his ideas, or rather, the filter through which many Jeffersonian ideals reached the 40th president. The narrative of American history was conceived in larger measure by Jefferson than any of the republic’s other founders, but its composition was left in large part to the storywriters who gave voice to Jefferson’s vision on the blank pages of an imaginary West. Ronald Reagan was, in a sense, one of this narrative’s final, larger-than-life characters.

In his second and final autobiography, published two years after leaving the White House, Reagan quotes Jefferson no less than six times, especially on the danger of government encroachment on personal liberty. He even cites Jefferson as “the first American to frame a balanced-federal-budget-amendment.”1 But Jefferson is not mentioned in Reagan’s previous autobiography, published in the 1960s as he was about to embark on a political career. This leads to the suspicion that Jefferson was invoked ex-post facto to justify the agenda of the Reagan presidency in an attempt to burnish his own legacy with the polish of one of the nation’s founders. This is not to say that Reagan hadn’t absorbed many of Jefferson’s ideas. He may have been an unconscious Jeffersonian through much of his life, only discovering the roots of his worldview much later.

By his own admission, Reagan cracked the books as little as possible in college, preferring football and dances to seminars and lectures. But Reagan could easily have derived many of the founder’s ideas and sensibilities through the diffusion of Jeffersonian ideals in American popular culture. During Reagan’s most impressionable years and in the early decades of his adulthood, few facets of American culture were more popular, and more suffused with Jefferson, than the Western genre of film and pulp fiction 
. . . . 

Glen Jeansonne is professor of 20th-century American history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is author or editor of Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Transformation and Reaction: America, 1921-1945 (HarperCollins, 1994), and seven other books. David Luhrssen has lectured at Marquette University, Beloit College, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is coauthor with Jeansonne of A Time of Paradox: America since 1890 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

1 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (Simon & Schuster, 1990), 337.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Looking Backward: The Southern Manifesto of 1956
Timothy S. Huebner

On March 12, 1956, ninety-six white southern members of Congress—nineteen senators and seventy-seven members of the House of Representatives—affixed their names to the “Southern Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” better known as the “Southern Manifesto.” The declaration, presented in Congress and published in newspapers across the country, constituted in essence the white South’s official response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which almost two years earlier declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. The Manifesto made clear the South’s intention to defy the Court and assert its authority over education and race relations. All signers were Democrats who hailed from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. Only three senators—Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee—and twenty-two representatives from the South never signed. If the Brown decision was a bold statement by a unanimous Supreme Court, the Southern Manifesto represented an equally firm response, signed by nearly 80% of the Southerners in Congress.

At first glance the Manifesto seems primarily a constitutional text, as the main arguments it put forth fit with the history of opposition to judicial power, as well as the states’ rights constitutional tradition. But before dismissing the Manifesto as a legal brief, we should examine more closely its non-constitutional claims. The drafters and signers of the Southern Manifesto presented a series of arguments in defense of segregation that harkened back to pre-Civil War proslavery ideology. By doing so, they showed how little the values of their own section had changed over the past century. During this 50th anniversary year of the Manifesto, historians should consider the wide-ranging themes of this important document and its lessons about the uniqueness of the white South’s historical experience . . . .

Timothy S. Huebner, associate professor of history at Rhodes College, is the author of The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790-1890 (University of Georgia Press, 1999). He is currentlywriting a textbook on the Civil War and Reconstruction era.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
The Public Use of History
Jeremy Black

The public use of history has become more apparent in recent decades. Since 1945 over 120 new states have been created, each of which has had to define a new public history.  At the same time, public histories in both old and new states have been, and are, contested. Far from there being any “death of the past” (Plumb) or “end of history” (Fukuyama), this process is active and important, albeit at very different levels.

In 2005, for example, the discussion of 19th-century rural social changes created a furor in Scotland. The academic argument, advanced by Michael Fry, that these were not as harsh and disastrous as was once commonly believed was bitterly criticized by those who grounded Scottish national identity on a sense of loss and suffering, of foreign exploitation and domestic betrayal—a frequent theme around the world.  Another aspect of contested public memory occurred in China, as growing academic stress on the iniquities and harshness of Mao Zedong’s rule and regime clashed with the state orthodoxy that has been willing to admit to mistakes, but not to a very bloody and inefficient tyranny.

Public history is a topic rich in intellectual and pedagogic possibilities, but our teaching and writing about history reflect a self-referencing fascination with the technical aspects of research and, even more, epistemologies of history. Academics see themselves as the drivers of historical assessments. But changes in the public use of history are crucial to the general understanding of the past, and these developments stem largely from current political shifts and pressures. Thus, for instance, the recent collapse of communism across much of Eurasia was followed by a recovery of non- and anti-communist themes, topics, and approaches. In Estonia, for example, it became possible—indeed appropriate—to emphasize the destructiveness of Soviet conquest and occupation and to discuss both the many victims, as well as those who resisted. It will be instructive to see the degree to which the same process occurs in post-Castro Cuba.

The role of public history in politics is significant: issues of national identity and political legitimation are central. The context is often a long-term one. When, for example, members of the Polish Parliament from two populist parties occupied the chamber in 2002, they were criticized for reviving what were seen as the anarchic traditions of the old Polish Commonwealth. This was a very charged comparison. Anarchic impulses were seen as a significant factor in the weakness that led to the partitions of Poland in 1772-1795.

Public history is in large part a product of broader patterns of social experience, such as shifts in collective memory, and of social change, e.g., the rise of literacy. These patterns of social experience create narratives and analyses that are somewhat different from those that predominate in Western academic circles. For example, there is a tension between popular and academic approaches over the role of contingency and human agency. Popular narratives rely upon the drama of human agency: people make history. Drawing frequently on the social sciences, academic historians often emphasize the structural aspects of situations—necessity can be purchased at the expense of choice and contingency. Such tensions can be seen in the differing response to shifts in academic historiography. For example, although the Annales approach to history was highly influential in the academy, it has had very little impact on popular views. Similarly, the public has shown limited appetite for the more fractured, complex discussions of the past produced by Western scholars. Another major divide between public interest and academic fashion relates to objectivity. Popular history assumes the possibility of objectivity or, at the minimum, detachment, something many academic historians influenced by the “linguistic turn” in historiography consider epistemologically naive.

In short, academic history is guided by an idealist approach, one that regards issues of historical theory and method, e.g., the recovery of truth or the creation of “truths,” as more significant than what is taught in classrooms or published in popular works. Linked to this is a hierarchical structuring of relations within the historical profession. Those who focus on historiography claim what is akin to a higher purpose compared to those colleagues who work on narrative or empirical topics.

There is also the more general question of the reputation of academic historians outside the profession. In recent decades the idea of the intellectual, the practice of free speech, and the institutional autonomy of universities combined to give academic historians a measure of independence. But this is under challenge in the West. Aside from political and governmental pressures, both in evidence in Britain, there are also those that stem directly from popular interests. This is readily apparent in the case of religious history, where academic discussion of key aspects of Christian history has been swamped by the outpourings stemming from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.

Irrespective of this, and in contrast to the self-image of the modern Western academic, the role of the academic as the servant of the state is more important across much of the world. It is likely that this role will become more significant in the future, especially in East and South Asia, where academics depend on public funding and generally operate under the threat of censorship. They work within a context in which the goal and content of most historical research and teaching are very sensitive: history is a crucial aspect of nationalism. Witness the recent controversies in China and Japan. Advance word that the 2005 edition of The New History Textbook created by the nationalist Japanese Society for Textbook Reform would remove “any reference to matters associated with . . . ‘dark history’ [issues such as the comfort women or the rape of Nanjing] that might make Japanese schoolchildren uncomfortable” prompted angry Chinese to stone the Japanese Consulate in Shanghai.

This raises the question of whether the relationship between academic and public history in the West is typical for the rest of the world—indeed, whether there can be global criteria for historiography. This issue can be clearly seen in debates over the relationship between nationalism and objectivity. Scholars in the West divide over the possibility of recovering the past, but they generally desire to avoid nationalistic partisanship. That, however, means little in many states across the world, where partisanship and national identity are intertwined.

At the same time, it would be woefully mistaken to imagine that these are only issues in the developing world. The controversy over the National History Standards, and, indeed, the unease that lay behind the establishment of the Historical Society in 1998, reflected the contentiousness of historical content and methods in both popular and academic circles. In Europe there is considerable contention over the historical nature of its identity and culture. This is far from being only of academic interest. The issue is very much to the forefront as Turkish accession to the European Union is debated. This directly relates to such questions as the role of Christianity in European identity and the nature of Turkish development in the 20th century. The latter has been particularly contentious in the case of Turkish willingness to confront the Armenian massacres, while there has also been European criticism of the nature of Atatürk’s regime.

In European settlement societies, particularly Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, the Andean States and the U.S., there is also the question of how “first peoples” were treated. This was very much an issue in the New Zealand general election of 2005, with the center-right opposition National Party criticizing what its leader in 2005 termed the “grievance industry” centered on Maori land claims. He promised an end to the numerous claims and the reversal of any legislation granting special privileges to Maoris. What is termed “black armband” history with reference to the treatment of the Aborigines has also proved very contentious and divisive in Australia, and it has become more pronounced in recent years.

Global demographics will affect public history around the world. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s population increase is taking place in the developing world, and it is there that the pressures to provide a readily comprehensible public history will be most acute. It is interesting to note, for example, how Indian politicians, both from the Congress government and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) opposition, faced criticism as they addressed traditional suppositions about the unhelpful nature of British imperial rule as well as the role of Pakistan. In 2005 the willingness of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to offer a good-and-bad account of British rule caused controversy.

Governments in developing countries will need to develop unifying national myths, especially as the liberation myths used in the immediate postcolonial period become less potent. A variety of factors make this more urgent: the volatility of societies in the developing world, with the relatively large percentage of their populations under the age of twenty-five; the disruptive impact of urbanization and industrialization; the breakdown of patterns of deference and social control; and pressures on established networks, identities, and systems of explanation. There is also the challenge posed by particular constructions of ethnicity and religion within these states and how they interact with historicized notions of identity and development. We need to devote more attention in historiography courses to the process of forging new public histories in the developing world. It will be both interesting and important to see how dynamic societies come to grips with their recent and more distant past. And this will probably be the most significant aspect of historiography over the next century. 

Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He has recently published Introduction to Global Military History: 1775 to the Present Day (Routledge, 2005); A Subject for Taste: Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Hambledon, 2005); and Continental Commitment: Britain, Hanover and Interventionism, 1714-1793 (Routledge, 2005). This essay was adapted from his Using History (Hodder, 2005, distributed in the U.S. by Oxford University Press).
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

May/June 2006 
Volume VII, Number 5
Letters

Narrative and Popular History
Writing a response to an essay becomes more of a challenge when the responder fundamentally agrees with it.  Paul Jankowski’s essay “Guilt by Association” (Historically Speaking, March/April 2006) is a first-rate discussion of narrative history. There is also a certain irony that Jankowski and I share, writing analytically in praise of narrative.

Narrative and popular history are often linked. Many historians find popular history suspect. Look at another field, say, music, and this argument seems silly. The Beatles are the best-selling recording artists ever. They are also among the best. Being good and popular is hard, but why not try? Some first-rate historical works, such as those by James McPherson, sell very well.

Good historical narrative is harder to write than narrowly focused analysis. Too many historians do not wish to make the effort to relate their little picture to the context provided by the ever-present big picture. Narrowness, too, is often a product of political correctness. Some historians consciously try to restore a balance by shedding light on groups ignored in the past. This is good. It is not good, however, when distortions creep in, perspective is lost, and narrow segments are inflated far past their real importance. Like it or not, for most of the past white guys were running things. Why pretend otherwise?
 
Narrative, when taken to mean good storytelling, is the best way to get people interested in history. I am a writer, not an academic historian, and writers must use storylines to hook readers just as a carnival uses hucksters to attract customers. The best information, the greatest insights, the newest interpretations are useless unless disseminated. 

Bruce L. Brager
Arlington, Virginia
 

Goldstone and Ancient Mathematics
Both Jack Goldstone and readers of Historically Speaking should be informed that at least one statement in his article “Knowledge—Not Capitalism” (Historically Speaking, March/April 2006) is very much incorrect: he writes “Greek mathematics remained weak on arithmetic and never developed algebra (the study of solving equations with unknown quantities)” or (the next sentence implies) “trigonometry.” The exact opposite is the case.

The Greeks had developed algebra and advanced it as far as quadratic equations well before the time Diophantus wrote a practical textbook on the subject sometime before the 4th century A.D. (evidence that places him in the 3rd century is highly conjectural, but on no account did he write later than that). The Arabs didn’t invent algebra. Arabic writers learned of and commented and improved upon algebra from Greek sources like this. Goldstone’s naive folk argument that the word “Algebra” being of Arabic derivation is evidence that Arabs invented algebra is as faulty as arguing that Ptolemy must have been an Arab because the title of his Almagest is Arabic.

The Greeks also invented trigonometry. Some basic trigonometric ideas may have originated in India, but the first theoretical treatises in the field begin with Apollonius of Perga and Hipparchus, both in the 2nd century B.C. Hipparchus composed the first known trigonometric tables and originated the modern system of degrees, minutes, and chords. Spherical trigonometry was then developed by Menelaus in the 1st century A.D. Hence, again, the Arabs didn’t invent trigonometry. Arabic writers learned of and commented and improved upon trigonometry from Greek sources like this.

On both facts, see “Diophantus,” “Apollonius,” “Hipparchus,” and “Menelaus” in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (including supplemental material in entries added in volume 15 of that work). For context see Serafina Cuomo, Ancient Mathematics (2001). In fact, I strongly urge all scholars and readers to make a more thorough effort to consult qualified sources on the actual achievements of ancient Greek mathematicians and scientists before issuing blanket statements about what they supposedly failed to do. Rodney Stark, for example, is thoroughly corrected on the subject of Hellenistic science in works like Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 B.C. and Why It Had to Be Reborn (1996).

Richard C. Carrier
Columbia University
 

Goldstone’s Reply to Carrier
Richard Carrier refers to the following paragraph in my text: “Lacking the Arabic system of numerals, Greek mathematics remained weak on arithmetic, and never developed algebra (the study of solving equations with unknown quantities). ‘Algebra’ and ‘algorithm’ are Arabic words, reflecting their origins. Chinese, Indian, and Muslim mathematicians all developed algebra, trigonometry, number theory, and infinite series well beyond anything the Greeks accomplished, and long before Europeans.”

He is correct, in that my foreshortened—by editorial decision—sentences could mislead. The first sentence should have continued: “…quantities) to the extent of most other premodern civilizations, where higher-order polynomial equations were studied and solved.” The second sentence should have continued:  “… reflecting their origins in modern European science from Arab texts, rather than Greek.” The third sentence never says that Greeks did not begin the study of trigonometry, only that other premodern civilizations carried the topic further.

The point of my paragraph was not to denigrate the Greek achievements. Rather, I was responding to the tendency, which I saw reflected in Stark’s emphasis on the uniquely Western character of “reason,” to treat the Greeks as the sole, or at least overwhelmingly primary source of Europe’s modern mathematical and scientific thinking. That is simply incorrect, as from roughly 300 A.D. to 1200 A.D., Europeans did little to advance the pioneering work of Greek mathematicians, geographers, and astronomers in geometry, trigonometry, and other fields. Rather, the Greek advances were built upon and carried forward in the Islamic lands from Spain to India and only then received into Europe. It was the Arabic version of Greek mathematics and science, which included many new ideas and advances in thought and exposition, that ignited the late medieval/Renaissance intellectual advances in the West.

My point was therefore not that the Greeks accomplished little, but that what they did accomplish, however original and significant, did not by itself generate later European work, nor was it unrivalled in other premodern civilizations. Rather, modern mathematics and science are rooted in a lengthy Greco-Indo-Islamic evolution in which the Indian and Islamic contributions were significant, original, and more directly sparked further European progress. The point that Russo makes in the work cited by Carrier, The Forgotten Revolution, is that much of the work of the Greek mathematicians of the 4th century A.D. was forgotten in Europe, and had to be rediscovered and revived for European science to advance—a task that probably would not have been possible without the Islamic absorption and considerable advancement of Greek science that occurred in the following millennium.

To pick one example on which Carrier focuses, namely trigonometry, it is either a mistake or a fabrication (in which one describes trigonometry in a specific way) to say that “The Greeks invented trigonometry.” Carrier admits that “Some basic trigonometric ideas may have originated in India.”  Indeed, the Vedic texts (ca. 700 B.C.) use trigonometric principles to estimate the square root of two to five decimal places.1 The Greeks built their trigonometry on the work that Babylonians had done centuries earlier, as shown by their taking the Babylonian 360 degree sexagesimal system as the basis of their work with angles. What the Greeks, in particular Hipparchus, as far as we know, were the first to do was to systematize trigonometric findings and abstract them from practical work in surveying, construction, and astronomy (the context of trigonometric work in India, Egypt, and Babylon), publishing tables of chords and angles.

However, it is incorrect to say that Hipparchus “originated the modern system” of trigonometry. The foundation of modern trigonometry, namely the sine function, is absent in Hipparchus’s work and in that of his Greek successors Menelaus and Ptolemy. Rather, it came from an Indian/Arab development.  “Even if the Hindus were influenced by the Greeks and gained knowledge from their works, the Hindu trigonometry definitely took on a new form. The trigonometry of Ptolemy was based on the functional relationship between chords of a circle and the central angles they subtend.The writers of the Siddhantas [ca. 400 A.D.] changed this to a study of the relationship between half of a chord of a circle and half of the angle subtended at the center by the whole chord. From this stemmed the predecessor of the modern trigonometric function known as the sine of the angle.”2 The word “sine” in fact comes from the Latin translation of an Arab term taken from the Indian word for the function based on the half-chord. “In Arabia, there was a competition of two types of trigonometry, that of the Greeks, dealing with the geometry of chords, and that of the Hindus, involving their table of sines.  There was a conflict, but the Hindus prevailed. The Arabs adopted the Hindu line of thinking, resulting in most Arab trigonometry being based on the sine function. . . . As a result of this development, the first real trigonometry emerged.”3 And it was from this Arab trigonometry that medieval Europeans learned about trigonometric functions.

Although this detailed history is complex, it is necessary to present the genuine historical foundations of Western science, and thus eventual Western material progress. It may be true that the Greeks were the first to systematize and abstract various practical methods and findings found in ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian texts, and that they made great progress in many areas of mathematics. But Islamic and Indian scholars then further systematized, formalized, and advanced the concepts and findings of the Greeks, as the later Greeks (e.g. Byzantines) and Romans did not, and it was primarily from the products of these other cultures that modern European science grew. It is therefore misleading to say that trigonometry was “invented” by any one man or nation, and quite mistaken to say that “modern” trigonometry (or modern science in any sense) was created “by the Greeks.”

Modern science was a creation of 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century Europeans (and a few Americans), but it was based on a fusion of Greek, Hindu, and Arab methods, concepts, and texts. To exalt one of these groups and discount the others weakens, rather than strengthens, our understanding of the debts that moderns owe to ancient civilizations.

Jack Goldstone
George Mason School of Public Policy

1 J.J. O’Connor and E.F. Robertson, “The Indian Sulbasutras,” www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~his
tory/HistTopics/Indian_sulbasutras.html.

2 Tara Adamek, Kaitlyn Penkalski, and Gina Valentine, “The History of Trigonometry,” Rutgers Department of Mathematics, May 11, 2005,  www.math.rutgers.edu/~mjraman /History_Of_Trig.pdf, 6-7.

3 Ibid., 8.
 
 

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