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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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