| "Western Civ" and the Staging of History in American Higher Education | The American Historical Review, 105.3

"Western Civ" and the Staging of History in
American Higher Education

DANIEL A. SEGAL

The project of provincializing "Europe" refers to a history that does not yet exist.¹

In this essay, I document and analyze the incorporation of social evolutionary thinking about humanity into history survey courses and textbooks—both "Western" and "World"—that have been taught at U.S. colleges and universities from the emergence of the "Western Civ" survey course in the 1920s to the present day.² In locating social evolutionary thinking in the undergraduate history curriculum, I seek to unsettle and rethink the conventional identification of this bundle of ideas as "Victorian anthropology"—a label that confines social evolutionary thinking to a completed past and a singular disciplinary tradition. Most generally, my concern is not with the fate of social evolutionary theory within the history of anthropology per se but with the dispersion of social evolutionary thinking across disciplines and with its circulation and accreditation in higher education. In one sense, then, this article participates in, and aims to promote, a history of the disciplines that is concerned with the division of labor between disciplines, as well as their existence as subjects in schooling.³ 1

     I begin by examining how the defining elements of the first cohort of "Western Civ" survey courses and textbooks came together before World War I in the writings and classroom teaching of James Harvey Robinson.⁴ Whereas anthropologists in the Victorian era were much occupied by the overthrow of the biblical chronology of human existence, historians were not.⁵ Yet, notwithstanding the lack of discussion of the long chronology by historians, "history" acquired a new meaning at this time. "History" came to be understood, in a narrow sense, as a relatively recent and brief period of human time, defined in opposition to its newly discovered precursor: "prehistory." In the early twentieth century, the long chronology, made up of these two qualitatively distinct periods, was explicitly and prominently affirmed in the "new history" championed by Robinson.⁶ For the most part, scholars who have examined Robinson's "new history" have accorded little import to his discussions of the vastness of human time, almost certainly because these passages seem to belabor what was, even then, an already established finding of science.⁷ By contrast, I argue that the long chronology was central to Robinson's thought and vision of history. For Robinson, the meaning of history came into view not by looking "close-up" but by stepping back, in order to see history in relation to the entirety of human time and, more specifically, in relation to prehistory. From the vantage afforded by the long chronology, declared Robinson, one saw with clarity that there was an overall and singular trajectory of human existence—a line of development. For Robinson, then, chronological time was developmental time. The long chronology was thus a standard of measure, or metric, of the civilizational status of "peoples" and, at the same time, the world's "peoples" were representatives of different developmental and chronological times. In addition, Robinson's sense of historical time as both brief and entirely recent made it a "surveyable" whole integrally attached to, rather than distant from, the present. 2

     As a teacher, Robinson used this constellation of ideas to organize and give narrative coherence to his famous graduate course at Columbia University, offering students a survey that traced the rise of rational thought, located in the West, from a baseline defined by prehistoric and non-European Others. In the years between the two world wars, the survey pioneered by Robinson was taken as a model for both courses and textbooks designed for broad undergraduate audiences. By the 1940s, Robinson's "new history" had been widely institutionalized in higher education, transposed into what has been known ever since as "Western Civ." 3

     In the second half of this article, I jump forward in time for the purpose of examining, in the light of this historical account, the "Western Civ" and "World History" textbooks in use on U.S. campuses today. I argue that contemporary texts of both genres show fundamental continuities with the social evolutionary narrative and plot pioneered by Robinson and then adopted so widely as "general education." In today's texts, whether "Western" or "World," we find largely coincident divisions of time, development, and peoples. In these textbooks, as in their predecessors, history is both post-prehistory and the segment of time ahead of Others. Even when Otherness—the radically unfamiliar—is not crystallized in the specific figure of "the prehistoric," it is positioned as behind an already charted course of history or, alternatively, as contrary to the known trajectory of history. These textbooks thus provide a "grand narrative," in Dorothy Ross's sense of a story of all human existence, that provides students a highly circumscribed sense of both historical contingency and human possibilities.⁸ 4

The replacement, in the late 1850s and the 1860s, of the biblical chronology of human existence by the secular or archaeological chronology involved a dramatic change in the scale of human time: from a few thousand years to many tens and even hundreds of thousands of years.⁹ As Thomas Trautmann has written, "Time opened out indefinitely backward; we may truly say that the bottom dropped out of history."¹⁰ Among the earliest of European and North American intellectuals to register and engage this "revolution in human time" were the relatively small number of scholars concerned with human global diversity. The new chronology rendered infeasible the ethnological and philological projects of reconstructing the history of the peopling of the earth in the aftermath of the Flood (Genesis 6–9). The vastness of the new archaeological timescale dwarfed the arboreal image of humanity's "physical history" that had been built on biblical teachings, while also disrupting the project of producing anything like a complete historical account of human existence, in the sense of a continuous narrative of events.¹¹ 5

     As Trautmann and George W. Stocking have demonstrated, Victorian anthropologists filled in the immensely expanded scale of human time with hypothetical, or "conjectured," stages, arranged to form not a figure of a branching tree but a single line of development. In this anthropological vision, living contemporaries—non-European Others—were deployed as exemplars of the stages of human development that civilized Europeans, it was presumed, had passed through during the long-ago. This was the "comparative method," by which social evolutionary anthropology was known in its day. Differences in human lifeways were thus laid out along a reference line of both time and development; such differences were not understood in terms of myriad and unrankable cultures, as a subsequent anthropology would, with difficulties, propose. Overall, then, the emerging discipline of anthropology wedded a prior European discourse of the scale of civilization to both the new secular chronology and what was, in the Victorian era, a rapidly expanding body of "knowledge" about non-European Others.¹² 6

     In the resulting body of social theory, the thesis of a single line of human development was grounded in the premise that a uniform human intellect (the "psychic unity of mankind") kept different transhistorical "peoples" on the same problem-solving pathway. At the same time, the scale of human time provided a ready idiom for stressing that different "peoples" were developmentally far apart and, as such, far apart in their propensity for development. Thus, as Stocking has concluded, despite both the "presumption of human psychic unity" and the "relative lack of explicit concern with racial differentiation, the impact of classical [social] evolutionism on the European image of man had perhaps less to do with reshaping thinking about the commonalities of human nature than with regrounding assumptions about human differences."¹³ Indeed, one might even say that the social evolutionary figure of a vast timescale was deployed in ways that replicated many of the ideological effects of polygenist anthropology, even though the leading proponents of social evolutionary theory shared with their ethnological predecessors a disavowal of the doctrine of the independent creation of human races—though on secular, not biblical, grounds. 7

     Finally, it is important to note the significant divergences between Victorian social evolutionary theory and Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution, particularly since the two have often been conflated. In Darwinian theory, biological evolution led over time not to a single future but to speciation, that is, to a differentiation of biological populations. Furthermore, the mechanism of change in Darwinian theory was a combination of random variation and selection, rather than problem-solving directed by the intellect. In these important ways, social evolutionary theory was not Darwinian. What Victorian social evolutionary anthropology did take from Darwinian understandings of biological evolution was the image of a primate ancestor for modern humans, with the effect that the study of primates, the fossil record, and non-European "peoples" came to be identified alike as windows onto "early man."¹⁴ 8

The new chronology and the social evolutionary understanding of it were not confined to disciplinary anthropology, however. Rather, these notions of human time entered broadly into secular knowledge. A key artifact and carrier of the secular and social evolutionary understanding of human time was a new distinction between two developmentally sequenced segments or periods of time: "prehistory" and "history." The emergence and early circulation of this new binary can be tracked by turning to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.¹⁵ The earliest citation for "prehistory" is from 1871; the definition given is "[the time] prior to written or recorded history." In the entry for "prehistorian," the earliest citation is from 1893, and the term is defined as "one who studies the remains . . . of prehistoric times."¹⁶ In this pair of definitions, what distinguishes the two periods of time is their association with qualitatively distinct artifacts—writing and remains. The division of human time was thus pegged to a striking difference in human activity, specifically the absence or presence of written records. 9

     Yet even as this distinction entered the vernacular of educated speakers and writers of English, it is fair to say that the issue of human time did not become a central or even significant topic for disciplinary historians working in English during the last half of the nineteenth century. Examining both writings of prominent English-language historians and records of history course offerings at U.S. colleges and universities from these decades, I have found scant mention of either the vastness of human time or prehistory.¹⁷ Such indifference was possible, in part, because even as the signification of "history" was altered by the new opposition with prehistory, the term's referential meaning remained largely what it had been: the years comprising "history" were much the same whether "history" was understood as the entirety of human time in the biblical chronology or as the brief segment after prehistory in the new secular chronology. Similarly, the definitional contrast drawn in the OED, between a time of "remains" and a time of "writing," affirmed the most characteristic methodological delineation of historical scholarship of this era, even as the long chronology shaped anew the meaning of "documents" and "writing." Finally and most generally, the new scale of time simply did not disrupt any ongoing research program in the emerging discipline of history. Under these circumstances, the fact that "the bottom dropped out of history" was not immediately disturbing to historians. 10

     By contrast, roughly half a century later, and some three decades after the publication of the most exemplary works of social evolutionary anthropology, the long chronology appeared prominently in the work of James Harvey Robinson.¹⁸ Without suggesting that Robinson was the first historian to affirm or reflect on the long chronology, I do want to propose that Robinson's engagement with it was without precedent in disciplinary history. 11

     A professor of history at Columbia University from 1895 to 1919, Robinson was enormously influential through his own writings, his training of graduate students, and his service on a host of professional committees concerned with history education in the United States.¹⁹ For Robinson, what made the long chronology both visible and something to grapple with was a commitment to "the unity of knowledge."²⁰ More specifically, Robinson's faith in the authority of science meant that, for him, the legitimation of historical knowledge required that it be of a piece with the established doctrines of the sciences. Given this intellectual commitment, the long chronology had particular salience for Robinson as a historian. 12

     When representing and discussing the long chronology, Robinson made repeated use of a dramatic—though for us, hackneyed—rhetorical device; he plotted all of human existence onto the twelve hours visible on the face of a clock or watch. For example: 13

     In order to understand the light which the discovery of the vast age of mankind casts on our present position, our relation to the past and our hopes for the future, let us . . . imagine the whole history of mankind crowded into twelve hours, and that we are living at noon on the long human day. Let us, in the interest of moderation and convenient reckoning, assume that man has been upright and engaged in seeking out inventions for only two hundred and forty thousand years. Each hour on our clock will then represent twenty thousand years, each minute three hundred and thirty-three and a third years. For over eleven and a half hours nothing was recorded. We know of no persons or events; we only infer that man was living on earth, for we find his stone tools, bits of his pottery, and some of his pictures of mammoths and bison. Not until twenty minutes before twelve do the earliest vestiges of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization begin to appear. The Greek literature, philosophy, and science of which we have become accustomed to speak as "ancient," are not seven minutes old. At one minute before twelve Lord Bacon wrote his Advancement of Learning . . . and not half a minute has elapsed since man first began to make the steam engine do his work for him.²¹

Figured and understood in these terms, the vastness of human time contributed in at least three ways to Robinson's "new history":

     First, by providing Robinson a basis for placing historical events in a very long term perspective, the secular chronology made it possible for him to perceive and affirm that there was an overall, and thus a singular, direction to human history. Paying attention to the vastness of human time allowed Robinson to make out a prevailing plot of "progress," for it made it possible to figure events that were refractory to that plot as proportionately insignificant, that is, as no more than minor perturbations relative to the long-term human project of "building civilization." Ironically, then, Robinson's famous presentism—his insistence that history should be written and taught so as to explain "this morning's newspaper"—was grounded in a panoramic view of time that also brought the very distant past prominently into view.²² For Robinson, moreover, making humanity's long-term trajectory available for inspection was also a means of contributing to it. By revealing that "progress" was invariably due to rationality and its exemplar "science," the teaching of history could promote their use and wider social authority. As a subject of study, history could thereby help humanity to proceed ever more steadily on the path of progress. In addition, it could identify, for the purpose of elimination, irrational survivals, including various "traditional" beliefs.²³ Disciplinary history thus had the noble, though decidedly secular, mission of aiding the further "building of civilization." 14

     Second, in Robinson's "new history," the perception of progress over the long chronology of human existence supported a broadening of historical research beyond, and a shift away from, a narrowly "political history." Relative to the context of the long chronology, even the most durable states and dynasties were fleeting, and the building of "civilization" involved the transmission of human achievements over the ages, as states rose and fell. In addition, Robinson's perception of civilization's prehistoric past located the beginnings of human progress even prior to state formation. 15

     Yet Robinson's disdain for "political history" was not solely a result of his affirmation of the long chronology. Fashioning himself as an iconoclast, Robinson cast "reason" as the opponent of both convention and authority. "Reason" was thus located neither in the state nor in the governing elite but in what Robinson termed "the intellectual class." Here is a key contrast between Robinson and the "historico-political" scholars of the previous generation. Unlike such figures as John W. Burgess and Herbert Baxter Adams, Robinson never conceived of his role as a professor of history to be training young men to take up the administrative reins of the state.²⁴ Rather, he saw the purpose of teaching history, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, to be the fostering of a vanguard—if not somewhat avant-garde—intellectual class, as part of the larger project of advancing human civilization. 16

     In Robinson's writings, the flip side of the turn away from "historico-politics" was a wide-ranging movement into intellectual and cultural history, as well as into the history of science and technology.²⁵ Even beyond these areas, Robinson's commitment to showing that the works of "the intellectual class" had yielded benefits for all humanity led him to promote, though not really practice, social history. In sum, Robinson's deep concern with melioration over human time made him an energetic proponent of a vast expansion of historical inquiry, even into areas that some historians today might still regard as novel. In a 1936 essay titled "The New History, Twenty-Five Years After," Crane Brinton wrote that Robinson and his followers "have always insisted . . . on the dullness and triviality of lists of kings and battles, [and] on the interest and significance of underclothes, dime novels, and whiffletrees."²⁶ 17

     Third, Robinson's understanding of the long chronology figured "history," in a narrow sense, as but a subset or segment of human time. As Robinson apprehended it, this segment was seamless and singular over its course, possessed of a demonstrable and recent beginning, and located at the "contemporary," or unfolding, end of humanity's long existence. The rest of human time was, by contrast, prior to and outside of history. 18

     In the context of the long chronology, for example, Robinson found it "obvious" that "those whom we call the ancients—Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Lucretius—are really our contemporaries," and similarly that "Bacon, Newton, and Darwin are but the younger contemporaries of Thales, Plato and Aristotle." In these formulations, "the ancients" are located not close to the beginning of human time but in "our" time. The foundation for this conclusion, Robinson stressed, was the secular chronology of human existence: "However remote [the ancients] may have seemed on Archbishop Usher's plan of the past, they now belong to our own age." History in its entirety was thus something both contemporary and contemporaneous. Embracing this general view with fervor and without qualification, Robinson dismissed as "highly artificial" any division of "history," whether into the established tripartite scheme or any other. "Unity and continuity," declared Robinson, were fundamental properties "of history." In support of this broad doctrine, which he highlighted in many contexts, Robinson authored a pair of lengthy and tendentious essays that maintained that neither the Fall of Rome nor the French Revolution involved any but superficial discontinuities.²⁷ In sum, historical time had two key properties for Robinson: it was a seamless whole, and its earliest moments ("those whom we call the ancients") were still quite recent. Construed in this way, history was something that could be surveyed. 19

     Robinson's perception of "the unity" of history tied together more than just temporal moments, however. It also mapped out, and thereby congealed, a generalized place or "region." In speaking of such figures as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle on the one hand and Bacon, Newton, and Darwin on the other as "our contemporaries," Robinson placed (ancient) Greece, (early modern through Victorian) England, and North America (of the present day) all within the big tent of the first person plural pronoun—"our."²⁸ While in other passages, Robinson also included examples from other sites within "Western Europe" as components of "history" and as "contemporaries," he never brought places outside Europe and North America into this unified whole. History as a segment of human time was thus linked discursively to geography in Robinson's writings, with the specific effect of affirming a historical consciousness that tied America of the present day to a past that was distributed widely throughout Europe and extended back to the very dawn of history.²⁹ In sum, when particularized and filled in, the "unity and continuity of history" was also the unity and continuity of the West's civilizational lineage—a lineage that had been neither settled nor self-evident to Robinson's disciplinary predecessors.³⁰ 20

     Finally, for Robinson, "the unity and continuity of history" was supported, somewhat paradoxically, by a perception of a single rupture in human time, located at the very beginning of "history." In Robinson's figuring of the long chronology, let us recall, "nothing was recorded" during the first "eleven and a half hours" of human existence. In this formulation, there is no possibility of extending historic knowledge into the first "eleven and a half hours." It is not merely that we lack records from those hours, but that no records were produced in that Other time. The divide between prehistory and history is thus figured not as contingent, or as an artifact of the current state of knowledge, but as an objective and unalterable difference. Indeed, says Robinson, "we only infer that man was living on earth, for we find his stone tools, bits of pottery"—which is to say, we find only remains. And among the remains of prehistory that Robinson recognizes are "the simplest tribes today." Consistent with this, Robinson's entry on "Civilization," written for the 1929 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, explicitly endorsed the "ingenious analogies" drawn by "anthropologists" between "Tasmanians, Australians, Eskimos, etc." and "the Neanderthal race."³¹ Yet Robinson, as a historian, was not interested in using the comparative method to reconstruct the stages of human development in prehistory; for Robinson, the comparative method was instead a means to establish a baseline for and a beginning of history, in the guise of a generalized "prehistory." Adapting Trautmann's formulation, we might say that, for Robinson, prehistory and its living representatives were a means of "re-bottoming" history while maintaining a clear allegiance to the scientific fact of the long chronology. 21

In his 1936 essay, Crane Brinton observed that the ideas of Robinson and his allies "have probably penetrated into the consciousness of more men and women . . . than those of any other group of American historians, past or present." "In college and university," Brinton added, "their triumph is almost . . . complete."³² It is worth tracing just how the "new history" passed from the realm of scholarship into the undergraduate curriculum, and specifically into the introductory level Western Civ survey course. 22

     Robinson himself never taught introductory level courses for undergraduates at Columbia, although he did produce two textbooks that were widely used in such courses during the first two decades of the twentieth century.³³ Yet, in contrast to his essays, these textbooks neither used nor discussed the long secular chronology of human existence. In addition, as Robinson recognized with some discomfort, the temporal framing of his textbooks was in tension with his avowed rejection of the division of historical time into the three conventional "periods," for his texts were defined precisely in these terms.³⁴ In short, Robinson's own textbooks did not offer "surveys" of human, or even historical, time—no doubt because Robinson, as a textbook author, conformed to the existing market as defined by the courses then being taught at U.S. colleges and universities. 23

     One teaching venue into which Robinson did introduce his understanding of human time was a popular and influential graduate course, which he taught from 1900 through 1915 under a variety of titles.³⁵ When Robinson first offered this course, the temporal-geographic coverage was restricted to Medieval Europe. But as he revised the course from year to year, he extended its temporal frame by moving forward to study "the modern scientific spirit" and backward to "the ancient world" and, ultimately, to a generalized baseline identified as the "primitive reasoning of man."³⁶ Thus, as the course took on an increasingly panoramic view of human time, it achieved coherence through a plot: the rise of rational thinking from prehistory to the present. To support this plot—as in his later Britannica entry "Civilization"—Robinson deployed the "comparative method" characteristic of social evolutionary theory: "primitive intellectual life," he declared on the course outline of 1915, "can be deduced from archaeological survivals and from the study of contemporaneous savages."³⁷ In terms of its geographic coverage, the temporally extended version of the course located "prehistory" as global before historic time and as exclusively outside of "the West" in the present. By contrast, in its much more extensive coverage of "history," the course mapped out and stayed within the transatlantic "West." Beginning in Greece, it moved generally to the west and north as it moved forward in time and ended, geographically, by spanning the North Atlantic. In sum, between 1900 and 1915, Robinson's graduate course became a chronologically sequenced survey of the rise of rational thought, located in the West, starting from a developmental baseline defined by Others who lived either in prehistory or outside the West. 24

     Along with recognizing the novelty and subsequent influence of Robinson's 1915 syllabus, Gilbert Allardyce—writing in these pages in 1982—identified two subsequent courses at Columbia as keys to "the rise" of the Western Civilization survey course: first, the U.S. Army's "War Issues Course," taught to student officers at Columbia in 1918, and, second, the university's own "Contemporary Civilization" course, which was introduced and made a requirement for freshmen in 1919.³⁸ Although there is no question that these two courses played an important role in the history of the "general education" movement in the United States, their connections to the Western Civilization survey course are more tenuous than Allardyce's narrative indicates. The War Issues Course at Columbia extended back in time only as far as the late nineteenth century, and its "issues" were about the war and the war's immediate causes. It was not, in short, a sweeping survey of the West's civilizational lineage.³⁹ As for Contemporary Civilization of 1919, its syllabus consisted of three units or "divisions." The first—titled "Civilization and Its Basis"—contained readings in social theory, most of them from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only the second unit, "Historical Background of Contemporary Civilization," offered students a historical narrative, although its temporal coverage began not with "prehistory" or "the ancients" but with the Old Regime of the eighteenth century. The third and final segment of the course was "The Insistent Problems of Today," and it drew heavily on social-scientific studies of the early twentieth century, primarily from economics, sociology, and political science.⁴⁰ Simply put, at its inception in 1919 at least, Columbia's Contemporary Civilization does not fit its assigned role in Allardyce's narrative as "the mother of Western Civ."⁴¹ 25

     Where one can, by contrast, find both close connections to Robinson's 1915 syllabus and evidence of the movement—or more precisely, the transposition—of its basic narrative into undergraduate teaching is in the publication, beginning in 1926, of a cluster of textbooks that were as remarkably novel (relative to their predecessors) as they were alike (relative to each other).⁴² These new works had at least four distinctive traits. First, they prominently affirmed the long chronology and, with few exceptions, included accounts of prehistory as part of their overall narratives. By contrast, the long chronology and prehistory were absent from earlier history textbooks, including works of "universal" and "general" history published after the overthrow of the biblical chronology and used on U.S. campuses in the late nineteenth century.⁴³ Second, whereas by the beginning of the twentieth century, courses and texts on "universal" or "general" history had lost favor to courses and texts that were more limited in their temporal scope and defined by the received tripartite periodization of history, the new textbooks of the 1920s and 1930s brought ancient, medieval, and modern history all into a unified narrative, written to fit the dimensions of the academic year.⁴⁴ Third, in contrast to exceptionalist understandings of U.S. history that were then prevalent, these new texts figured America of the present day as continuous with, and as carrying forward into the future, a European heritage that extended back to the very beginnings of history. Fourth, these textbooks ranged beyond political, military, and diplomatic affairs, highlighting instead intellectual, cultural, scientific, and even social history.⁴⁵ Although Robinson himself did not participate in writing any of these new textbooks, many of them were (wholly or in part) by his students or junior colleagues who had taught "civilization" survey courses in the 1920s and 1930s, following their departure from Columbia for positions at other institutions. These formed the first generation of Western Civ texts as we know them today.⁴⁶ 26

     Uniformly, it was in their opening pages that these texts affirmed both the long secular chronology and the primary division of human time into prehistory and history, corresponding to states of savagery and civilization respectively. Even though this constellation of notions had been absent from undergraduate history textbooks and teaching before the 1920s, it became the standard way of initiating the Western Civ textbook. As illustrations of this early generic practice, consider these excerpts from the opening sections of two of the Western Civ texts published in the 1930s. The first is from a textbook published in 1938 that was an "outgrowth" of a course taught at the University of Michigan. Known as "the History of Western Civilization," the course had been introduced in 1930, in large part through the efforts of Preston Slosson, who had received his PhD at Columbia under Robinson and who co-authored the 1938 text.⁴⁷ In paragraph one of Chapter 1, this text told its student-readers: 27

We know that human beings have inhabited the world for a time so long that it can only be estimated roughly in terms of geological periods covering some hundreds of thousands of years. For all but a small fraction of this time, men have lived as savages or barbarians, and only at the end of a slow process did they acquire the mastery over their environment and their own savage instincts that laid the foundations for civilized life.⁴⁸

The second example is from The History of Western Civilization, one of two textbooks written in the 1930s by Harry Elmer Barnes, also one of Robinson's students at Columbia:

The history of Western civilization cannot be confined within the older historical chronology. It is now realized that man has been on earth for at least a million years . . . From the standpoint of time and culture alike, the whole civilization of man in the West since ancient Egyptian days is "modern" in character.⁴⁹

In both these texts, as in Robinson's "new history," the representation of the long chronology of human existence is densely packed with a coincident division of time, peoples, and developmental stages: between a drawn-out prehistoric past and a quite recent historical period, between Others and peoples of the West, and between primitive life and civilization. Because the distinctions were presented as structurally homologous, the corresponding terms of each pair were, in effect, symbols of each other. To put this slightly differently, in these texts, to speak of "the prehistoric" is to invoke not just a time but also a developmental stage ("savagery," "primitive life"), as well as certain places and peoples. Similarly, to speak of "the West" is to invoke not just a place and its people but also a particular segment of time ("history") and a developmental stage ("civilization").⁵⁰

     As an illustration of how this constellation of associations was articulated in these narratives, let us take Barnes's text as an example and follow its exposition. The History of Western Civilization begins with two chapters that together discuss "early man." In these chapters, Barnes cites two types of evidence: "physical remains" from the Old and New Stone Ages, and ethnographic reports of non-Western "primitives." Explaining the relevance of these reports, Barnes professes, though does not name, the comparative method that had been so central to social evolutionary anthropology: 28

[P]rimitive or less civilized peoples existing today . . . supply us with our knowledge of the social life of early man. We make the assumption that such present-day primitive peoples preserve the traits and institutions of an early stage in civilization which our own primitive ancestors passed through and left behind them.⁵¹

Geographically, Barnes's examples of "present-day primitive peoples" were drawn from around the globe, from Australia to Africa to North America to Oceania. In using this material, however, Barnes did not so much illustrate "primitive life" with exemplary cases of named and located peoples (much less persons) as fashion a composite portrait that effaced all particularities of both place and time. Barnes thus departed markedly in these initial two chapters from the conventions of historical narration.

     What shapes Barnes's composite image of "primitive man" is largely antithesis with, and specifically the absence of, "civilization" and its most emblematic features: writing, government, and material accumulation.⁵² Figured as the two endpoints of human time, these contrasts offer, at the very outset of the text, a guiding overview or map of the overall course of human existence. For example, in one passage, Barnes defines "primitive thinking" as the systematic opposite of "the mentality of a well-trained modern scholar, such as Bertrand Russell or John Dewey."⁵³ Barnes thus tells the reader that whatever might have happened between these endpoints—whatever odd course history may have taken from time to time—human existence over the long term is a story of the rise of rational thought, here epitomized by two leading figures of "modern scholarship"—one from each side of the Atlantic. However, the seeming obviousness of this line of development depends on the depiction of "prehistory" as lacking what is known to be present in modernity. Because it is characterized in terms of absence and emptiness, the initial ordinal position of human time—the point of (human) origin—is, in effect, assigned the value of zero. Figured in relation to this initial reference point, the present appears as indisputably developed, given how fully it is populated with recognizable, because familiar, products of human ingenuity and labor. Thus the imaginary of a largely empty time prior to history and civilization establishes a point of origin that flattens the multidimensional complexities and discontents of history onto a one-dimensional scale, which can be nothing other than a metric of development. 29

     Following the two chapters on "early man," Barnes's text continues with three chapters on the transition between primitive life and civilization, thereby bridging the poles of this binary. In these chapters, the comparative reconstruction is more specific, both geographically and temporally. The examples are now from a limited set of named places: "the Near Orient," "Mesopotamia," and "West Asia." Similarly, this transitional stage is located temporally with greater specificity, using both dated archaeological materials and historical sources. Yet the narrative's characterization of these places and their "peoples" is not restricted to the span of time defined by these dates. Rather, by indicating that the peoples of these three places did not, on their own, develop beyond the "transition" to civilization, the text associates these peoples with this transitional stage. This linkage is encapsulated in Barnes's recurring phrase, "ancient Oriental times." As Barnes uses this expression, it is as if "ancient times" were the cultural property of a generalized Orient and its "peoples," and vice-versa, as if this Orient occupies this time, even in the present day. In sum, rather than dates preempting or disrupting an essentialist construction of Oriental "peoples," the dates serve instead to locate in time a characteristically Oriental stage of development. The peoples of "the Near Orient," "Mesopotamia," and "West Asia" are, in short, rendered exemplars of a dated developmental stage, just as living "primitives" are rendered exemplars of the chronologically less specific stage of "early man." 30

     The rest of Barnes's textbook, some forty-four chapters, focuses geographically on "the West" and temporally on "history," roughly the most recent three to four thousand years of time. Overall, Barnes's text maps three sequenced segments of human time onto three sequenced developmental statuses and three broad groupings of people. History is itself thus fit into a developmental scheme. Indeed, although history is explicitly figured as a series of documented events, and not in conjectural or generalized terms, here, too, in the narration of history, the comparative method rules. What establishes its operation beyond question is that the absence of Others from historical time in Barnes's text cannot be attributed to a simple choice of subject matter. After all, Barnes ranges all over the map when representing the human past prior to the most recent few thousand years. What keeps Others out of history is that, in accord with the comparative method, Others have been located before historical time—in the first five chapters of the text and only there. To put this slightly differently, it is not simply that Barnes has taken the West's history as his topic, as one among many histories that might be told, if in other textbooks for other courses. Rather, in Barnes's text—as in others of its ilk—the larger narrative of human time renders the West's civilizational lineage as universal history, just as it renders various Others as universal precursors to history and civilization. In the case of history, the universal remains singular ("Western") precisely because Others lag behind. 31

Into what context or contexts should Barnes's text and its peers be placed? What, more broadly, was the historical context of the transposition and circulation of Robinson's model into the undergraduate curriculum? In accord with the narrative it offered, Allardyce's 1982 article in the AHR attributed the introduction and rapid spread of the Western Civ survey to a "patriotic purpose" that "swept campuses" in response to U.S. military involvement in Europe. "The war," he argued, "vitalized an interpretation of history that gives the United States a common development with England and Western Europe."⁵⁴ In its general contours, this view of the origins of the Western Civ course has been widely circulated in recent years, no doubt in part because the linkage of Western Civ to U.S. militarism seems a self-evident truth to those of us living in the shadow of the 1960s.⁵⁵ 32

     Yet Allardyce's account of Western Civ's emergence at Columbia in the midst of and immediately after the war is a dubious piece of goods. Moreover, the authors of the new textbooks themselves speak neither of contributing to a patriotic (or nationalist) project nor more specifically of providing, by way of the West's civilizational lineage or anything else, an account of what American soldiers had fought for overseas. Rather, the claim made most often by these authors was that they had written their texts to guide the rebuilding of "civilization" in light of evidence of its dissolution at the very sites, and in the very midst, of progress. For these authors, in other words, Robinson's claims about the proper use of history had been made newly and intensely salient by evidence—beginning with but not limited to World War I—of the outbreak of "barbarism" and "savagery" in the homelands of "civilization," geographic Europe and the West more broadly.⁵⁶ 33

     It was just such concerns that Lynn Thorndike, also a student of Robinson's, identified as the raison d'être of his 1926 text, A Short History of Civilization, which was the first of the new textbooks: 34

When the world war broke in 1914, I determined to do what little I could to keep civilization alive. This volume is a contribution in that direction. I have written the book because I think it is needed . . . [S]o far there has been no adequate presentation of the main thread of the story of civilization between the covers of a single volume.⁵⁷

Fifteen years later, with World War I less immediately in view, Barnes wrote in a similar vein about his purpose in writing An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World: "For the first time in human history, mankind is directly confronted with a compulsory and relatively expeditious choice between utopia and barbarism . . . It is hoped that this book will contribute very directly to . . . [an] intelligent choice."⁵⁸ Much the same story can be told about Edward McNall Burns's singularly successful text, which appeared first in 1941 and which, in a twelfth edition, remains in print today.⁵⁹ A member of the Rutgers University faculty from 1928 until his retirement in 1962, Burns married in the spring of 1936 and promptly left on a honeymoon to Berlin and Moscow, destinations chosen so that he could examine in person "the two isms" (see Figure 1).⁶⁰ Distraught by what he found, when Burns returned to New Brunswick he commenced the writing of Western Civilizations. Burns proceeded without an advance and with much less certainty of a financial pay-off than do authors today. For Burns, Western Civilizations was unquestionably a calling.⁶¹

Figure 1: The passport photo of Edward and Marie Burns, obtained for a honeymoon trip in 1936 to travel to Berlin and Moscow, sites chosen in order "to study the two isms." Photograph reproduced courtesy of Eleanor Burns Larson.

     Locating these textbooks, and thus the emergence of the Western Civ survey course, in the context of interwar anxieties about civilization's fate illuminates elements of these texts and courses that have gone undetected, or at least unmentioned, in recent curricular debates. To begin with, in seeking to write/right civilization, the authors of these texts urged a steadfast allegiance to a lineage of rationality, science, and civilization that (in their view) transcended contemporary strife, particularisms, and inhumanity. As a rule, these texts were avowedly internationalist, cosmopolitan, and secular.⁶² Burns himself, for instance, had once joined an organization that advocated a single world government as the most rational approach to resolving human conflicts; in introducing the first edition of his text, he declared that "all progress . . . has resulted from the growth of intelligence and tolerance, and . . . therein lies the chief hope for a better world in the future."⁶³ Moreover, while the authors of these works were oblivious to ways their cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and secularism were exclusionary and local, they offered a vision of North America's past that was, within specific limits, more inclusive than that of contemporary nativist and exceptionalist narratives. For example, by virtue of its marked secularism, Western Civilization in these texts was something other than, and something displacing of, Christian Civilization. It was inclusive of North American and European Jewry, though notably in a manner that placed religion in the background, in contrast to the emerging notion of a "Judeo-Christian tradition."⁶⁴ In addition, these textbooks presented "civilization" to students as the product of a long tradition of rational inquiry that, through education, they could join; in these texts, civilized status was thus not a privilege of birth and blood.⁶⁵ In both these ways, the grand narrative of these textbooks offered a welcoming tale for the first-generation college students whose numbers were swelling enrollments at and bringing religious and (limited) social class diversity to U.S. colleges and universities between the world wars.⁶⁶ 35

     None of this is to deny that these texts were saturated by Eurocentrism. It is instead to suggest that their Eurocentrism, rather than being a self-evident expression of U.S. patriotism or any similarly simple reflection of "power," was itself a historical phenomenon possessed of meanings and motives that are easily lost in retrospect. 36

That we have lost sight of our own recent disciplinary history does not necessarily mean that this past is past, however. Today's textbooks do not speak of "contemporaneous savages," and they carefully avoid proclaiming that "the West" has a monopoly on either "history" or "civilization," yet how much has really changed? Do the successors to the first generation of Western Civ texts deploy the long chronology, the distinction between prehistory and history, and the "comparative method" to convey a grand narrative of social evolutionary development? Do they inscribe coincident distinctions between time, development, and peoples? To judge this fairly, one must look beyond Western Civ texts and consider "World History" textbooks as well; for, in the last quarter-century, this latter genre has emerged as a vehicle for overcoming "Eurocentrism."⁶⁷ At least at the most obvious level, "World" texts both pluralize the civilization concept and bring Others into historical time.⁶⁸ 37

     Starting with their opening passages, both Western Civ and "World History" texts in various ways identify the proper subject of historical inquiry as "civilization," as distinct from the entire human past. It is, moreover, "World" textbooks—those that have committed themselves in geographic terms to universal coverage—that are most direct and insistent about this. To give one example, the section heading of one "World" textbook states the point with telegraphic boldness: "History as the History of Civilization."⁶⁹ Another tells students: "No world history includes everything, or even most things, about the past. It focuses on the activities of human civilizations, rather than human history as a whole. No world history would be manageable if this distinction were not kept in mind."⁷⁰ In this passage, the need to restrict one's attention, to avoid being overwhelmed by the plenitude of human experience, becomes a charter for including the "civilized" and excluding the "noncivilized." That there are alternative principles of selection and focus for historical inquiry is not even mentioned, just as there is no question in the text about the legitimacy of this principle as a basis for exclusion from its pages. 38

     Consistent with such definitions of historical inquiry, contemporary texts of both genres narrate, in their first few pages, the emergence of "civilization" as an empirical occurrence, one located chronologically in the recent past: "The human race was already ancient by the time civilization first appeared around 3500 years before the traditional date of the birth of Jesus."⁷¹ Another reads: "For several million years . . . , human beings lived in small communities, seeking to survive by hunting, fishing, and foraging . . . Then suddenly, in the space of a few thousand years, there was an abrupt change in direction . . . Historians call this process the beginnings of civilization."⁷² In sum, uniformly in these contemporary textbooks, "civilization" is restricted as an empirical phenomenon to historic time, and vice-versa, the much vaster expanse of prehistoric time is characterized as a time "Before Civilization"—to quote a phrase that is used as a section heading in more than one.⁷³ That this phrase has provoked no known controversy—at a moment when the use of "savagery," "barbarism," and "uncivilized" would be contentious—demonstrates how fully the idiom of the long chronology is today a legitimate metric of human difference for "the educated person."⁷⁴ 39

     In these texts, prehistoric time and pre-civilized life are identified, more concretely, with a generalized social type: "hunter-gatherers." In order to illustrate this prehistoric and pre-civilized type, the texts present both archaeological and contemporary ethnographic evidence.⁷⁵ One textbook tells us: "Stone Age humans gave up their former ways of life reluctantly and slowly. In fact, peoples such as the Bushmen of Southwest Africa still follow them today."⁷⁶ Here, living "Bushmen" are included within the set of "Stone Age humans" by virtue of "still" following "their ways of life." Similarly, in another text, a color photograph of a !Kung woman is presented as an illustration of the "paleolithic era."⁷⁷ In short, late twentieth-century persons who hunt and gather (or who are imagined to do so) are figured as remains of "prehistory," rather than as living in "history." To put this slightly differently, persons who hunt and gather, regardless of when in dated time they are living, are collapsed together into a superseded stage of social evolutionary time: "prehistory." Such an approach is, of course, profoundly ahistorical: distributing coeval human beings to different segments of a vast timeline masks the interaction between, say, twentieth-century states and twentieth-century forms of hunting and gathering. 40

     Even though the textbooks use specific peoples (and even photographed persons) as illustrations of prehistoric and pre-civilized life, their overall characterization of it relies extensively on received stereotypes of primitiveness. Humans at that "early stage," the textbooks tell students, lived without modifying the world around them: "the economy of Paleolithic peoples was limited to what nature provided . . . Paleolithic hunter-gatherers did little to manipulate nature."⁷⁸ The legend beneath the photograph of the !Kung woman similarly suggests an absence of human agency in prehistory: "This woman . . . exemplifies the only way human beings could support themselves before the invention of agriculture."⁷⁹ In this view, hunting-gathering is a matter of necessity, while other modes of production are, by contrast, matters of human preference. What is obscured in these accounts is, first, the substantial body of evidence testifying to the productivity of gathering and hunting modes of production; second, the extent and ways gathering and hunting practices alter, often purposefully, the environments in which they occur; and third, the documented record of the heterogeneity, rather than uniformity, of responses to agricultural practices on the part of persons engaged in gathering and hunting.⁸⁰ 41

     In accord with these images of primitiveness, the texts characterize prehistoric social relations in terms of the absence of "modern" institutions. For example, the narrative that follows the photograph of the !Kung woman tells readers that "hunter-gatherers lacked laws, judges, and political institutions in the modern sense."⁸¹ The final four words here create an important ambiguity. "In the modern sense" might be read as meaning "in any real sense" or "of any real worth," in which case the sentence would convey that hunter-gatherers had no laws, judges, or political institutions of any real significance. Alternatively, "in the modern sense" might be read as meaning "of a sort particular to modernity," in which case the sentence would convey that hunter-gatherers did indeed have these things, though of a variety unfamiliar to "us." But for this relativizing meaning to be sufficiently robust to eclipse the social evolutionary meaning, the text would have to provide some substantive sense of what the laws, judges, and political institutions of (some) "hunter-gatherers" were like, rather than just describing those laws, judges, and institutions in terms of absence and "lack." Given that no such positive account is provided, the relativizing meaning is present only for those predisposed to read the text in this way—which is perhaps sufficient to allow the final phrase to operate as a shield against the charge of ethnocentrism. The final four words thus illustrate a significant difference between contemporary textbooks and their 1930s predecessors: contemporary textbooks exhibit much more anxiety about the possibility that they will be criticized for being ethnocentric. 42

     I have focused so far on the beginnings of these textbooks, but it would be a mistake to think that social evolutionary notions are absent thereafter, as if deleting the prefaces and initial accounts of prehistory would excise these ideas. On the contrary, these ideas are present throughout, even in "World" textbooks. To understand how social evolutionary constructions of human difference circumscribe historical forms of narration even when (some) Others are brought into historical time, we need to consider more fully the implications of social evolutionary theory for the very notion of "the historic." From a social evolutionary perspective, for any given transition between stages, there are numerous "cases." The first of these is, however, unlike all the others: it is "historic," for it is something that has never before occurred. To invoke the common terms of this discourse, the first "case" is a "discovery" or a "revolution" or an "invention." By contrast, all "cases" that come after, whether they are second or last, are non-historic. In the social evolutionary scheme of things, they are replays of an already achieved achievement. They are, as the saying goes, merely acts of "reinventing the wheel," and thus located outside of history. 43

     As an illustration of how such a notion of "the historic" gives a social evolutionary plot to contemporary textbooks, whether "Western" or "World," consider the way texts of both genres represent, and fail to represent, the histories of people who, over the last 500 years, have lived by hunting and gathering. Texts of both genres opened by depicting the abandonment of gathering and hunting as a developmental transition made by "humanity" as a whole some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. From this social evolutionary perspective, all subsequent struggles to sustain gathering and hunting ways of life count as nothing more than a rerun of an already concluded development. In the same way, when textbooks of both genres narrate moments of "first contact" between various hunting-gathering peoples and European colonizers, they uniformly present the outcome of this "contact" as fully and immediately present in the initial moment. In no case does a narration treat this "contact" as if it had temporal extension or duration, or as if it were, in at least some aspects, without final closure. In these accounts, hunting and gathering modes of production disappeared instantly, which is to say automatically, in the face of a superior way of life. It is as if, following the moment of "first contact," there were no long-term and contingent struggles to sustain gathering and hunting ways of life, no complex syncretism between hunters and gatherers and those who have encroached upon them. It is, most succinctly, as if such "contact" was without history. In this view of things, cultures do not cross, they fall in line—a social evolutionary line, to be specific. 44

     The coverage of Native American histories in "World History" textbooks provides a further illustration of the ways social evolutionary thinking shapes an understanding of "the historic." Taking three of these texts, I have used their indexes to locate the passages in each text that concern Native Americans (see Tables 1–3). Listing these indexed passages in chronological order, I have identified the point in time (column 1), geographic site (column 2), and specific topic (column 3) for each passage. In effect, these tables extract from the textbooks the plot of the story that each tells about Native Americans. Put slightly differently, these tables show which specific moments, out of the overall and continuing history of Native Americans, are privileged as sufficiently important to merit coverage in these surveys of world history. The pattern of selection of these moments is strikingly uniform in these three textbooks and, indeed, in all the contemporary "World History" textbooks I have examined. 45

     Characteristically, when first presented, Native Americans are located in "prehistory" and generalized as "hunter-gatherers." Native Americans next appear as peoples who, prior to any contact with Europeans, were at the threshold or initial stage of civilization, as evidenced by the "invention" of agriculture. In these passages, too, Native Americans are grouped with others as instances of a common developmental stage more than they are represented with any historical or cultural specificity. For example, in a discussion of the New Stone Age, one text comments, "Certainly the Chinese and the Native Americans invented agriculture on their own."⁸² This formulation credits both "peoples" with building the first steps of civilization "on their own"; yet the credit is bestowed in a fashion that figures agriculture in the Americas and China as two cases of a single developmental transition, thereby affirming the notion of a universal developmental pathway for humanity, just as the premise of "independent invention" supported this figure in Victorian anthropology. 46

     Another text, Civilization: Past and Present, similarly generalizes Native Americans as a stage while depicting them as "emerging" from prehistory.⁸³ Chapter 8 of this work groups Native Americans with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa; it is titled "Emerging Civilizations in Sub-Saharan Africa and America to 1492." By contrast, the next chapter turns to Europe and is titled "The Patterns of European Civilization, 500–1500." The multiple contrasts between these chapters and their titles are worthy of note. While sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans share a chapter, Europeans get their own; while sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans have "emerging civilizations," Europeans have "civilization" without any qualification; and while sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans are placed into a time span with no definite beginning and an endpoint determined by the arrival of Columbus in America, the European chapter is tied to a finite and specific period of time determined by factors the text locates within "Europe" itself.⁸⁴ In sum, Europe is distinguished as being fully civilized, fully historical, and an autonomous agent of history, rather than its passive object. 47

     Returning to the plot extracted from these textbooks in Tables 1–3, we find that, following passages that locate Native Americans prior to civilization, the textbooks next discuss Native Americans at moments and sites of "first contact." Three of these moments of "contact" appear with the most regularity: 1492 in the Caribbean, the early sixteenth century in Mexico, and the early seventeenth century in New England. Significantly, after the last of these, Native Americans all but disappear. The major exception involves the so-called French and Indian Wars, in which Native Americans are represented as having made an impact on intra-European conflicts and thus on "history." But otherwise, Native American histories do not continue past the selected moments of "contact." Indeed, Tables 1–3 show that there is not a single indexed passage discussing Native Americans at any time after 1800. In these world histories, this is the temporal vanishing point of Native Americans.⁸⁵ The devastating assaults on, and confinement of, Native Americans by the U.S. government during the nineteenth century are not, for these textbooks, of world historical importance. 48

     In sum, the history of Native Americans is foreshortened: it is compressed toward and into moments of "contact." After contact, their history disappears into "the Mainstream of Civilization," to quote from the title of one of these works.⁸⁶ The textbooks thus establish closure on the history of Native Americans: Native Americans are placed into a past that is complete—a past that is over and done with—in contrast to "peoples" whose histories continue fully into the present. Here, we see one of the characteristic effects of social evolutionary understandings of human difference. Precisely because all humanity is held to be traveling along the same developmental path, cultural crossings are always an encounter between "backwardness" and "development," and their outcome is figured as predestined and fated: "the backward" inevitably and automatically, but not historically, gives way to "the developed." 49

     In a similar fashion, social evolutionary constructions of "the historic" shape the narrations of global industrialization in these textbooks. In each case, social transformations in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England are given extensive coverage. By contrast, subsequent moments at other locales are treated, in a variety of ways, as additional and derivative instances of the same or universal phenomena. They are replications and extensions, more or less successful, not other pathways that leave open a plurality of futures. The fundamental issue here is thus not the obvious—and often decried—fact of the texts' disproportionate coverage of some parts of the world (their "Eurocentrism"); rather, the fundamental issue is their en-case-ing of particularities in a universal sequence. Disproportionate coverage is merely the characteristic diagnostic sign of this social evolutionary uniformitarianism. To respond only, or even primarily, to this symptom is an act of misrecognition.⁸⁷ 50

     From these observations about these texts and their narratives, it follows that the distinction between civilization and noncivilization inscribed in their opening passages is not an exogenous element that has somehow been grafted onto histories and narratives otherwise innocent of it. These introductions are no mere formalities. Rather, the civilization/noncivilization binary that introduces these textbooks encapsulates and exemplifies a systematic principle of exclusion through the determination of "the historic"—a principle that proceeds according to the logic of the "comparative method" of Victorian anthropology and that, in effect, is a corollary or variant of it. To sum up the effects of this principle, even when the coverage of these texts is broadened from the West to the World, Otherness is collapsed into pre-history in their opening pages, and then left outside of the subsequent narrative on the basis of being behind history, that is, behind "history" as staged by social evolutionary thinking. 51

     Further evidence of the reduction of human histories to a social evolutionary scheme is to be found by considering the means by which a number of publishers produced new "World History" textbooks in the 1990s. Starting with an already published Western Civ text, they pursued additional profit from their prior investment by adding chapters about other places and histories, thereby assembling a work they marketed as a "World History" text. But what, primarily, did they add? The answer is indicated by the areas of expertise of the authors hired to write the new material. For example, the cover of Civilization in the West lists three authors, all historians of Europe; the cover of the "World History" sibling of this work, Societies and Cultures in World History, lists one additional author, a professor of East Asian history. Similarly, if one compares Western Civilization with its sibling work, World History, the additional author is also a professor of East Asian history. As these two examples suggest, the retrofitting of Western Civ texts as "World History" texts involves a consistent and highly limited displacement of Western Civilization. The primary component of the supplement is "the Orient," that is, the non-European Other that, for some time, has been identified as a "civilization"—albeit "ancient" and "stagnant"—much more so than any other part of the world outside the West. By contrast, the histories of non-European persons who have not similarly been associated with their own "civilization" are much more fully marginalized in these same world history texts. In simple and concrete terms, the texts contain many fewer pages about them. Thus, while the world-ing of history brings in "the Orient," it ascribes anew the division of humanity into civilizations and "peoples without history."⁸⁸ 52

     Consistent with this, in both "Western Civ" and "World History" texts, comparisons with "Europe" are made primarily with "Asia." For example, a number of these textbooks instruct students to think about why "Europe" rather than "Asia" discovered "America," or why "England" rather than "Japan" or "China" had an industrial revolution.⁸⁹ Such comparisons are used to identify the qualities that made "Europe" and its exemplary "nationalities" uniquely the vanguard of history. It is as if "Asia" is imagined as being the nearest rival to "Europe" in a race across epochs to a single goal line, thereby allowing "Asia" to serve as a foil for identifying the crucial difference that made "Europe," so to speak, "Europe." The absence of other Others from these comparisons appears to result from the view that these Others are too different—which is to say, too far behind—to serve this comparative purpose. 53

     Concomitantly, even the most global of these "World" texts systematically lack relativizing and historicizing comparisons that would aid students in apprehending the contingency of familiar institutions and practices. Instead, examples of radical and potentially destabilizing difference are bounded off as evolutionary dead ends or, what is equivalent, as inferior social forms. To cite one example, in World Civilizations, Aztec tribute exchange is said to have "interfered with the normal function of the market and created a peculiar . . . economy."⁹⁰ The text does not ask students to consider the possibility that in some times and places of human existence, something other than commodity exchange might, in fact, have comprised (and in the future, might again comprise) "the normal functioning of the market." Here, difference is "condemned to play the role of bad example."⁹¹ As a result, the capitalist world familiar to our students is rendered not as historically contingent but as something inevitable in the course of human development. 54

     This is not to say that these texts unequivocally exalt "progress." Indeed, to various degrees, they call attention to the "ills of civilization" and express nostalgic desires for "earlier" times. The "grand narratives" of these textbooks are social evolutionary in character not because they valorize everything about a familiar modernity but, rather, because they situate history within a larger developmental sense of human time and figure a singular sequence of transitions and a singular modernity as the standard and common heritage/fate of all humanity. To borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty's formulation, these textbooks steadfastly avoid provincializing "the West" and the modernity it signifies—even when they present themselves as covering "the world." 55

In contrast to the account I have presented here of the perdurance of social evolutionary theory in undergraduate history textbooks, American cultural anthropologists are fond of telling themselves and their students a triumphal story of the overthrow of social evolutionary theory by Franz Boas and the Boasians nearly one hundred years ago. The key elements of the Boasian critique are worth recalling, even more so if social evolutionary thought remains to be grappled with in our own time and classrooms, as I have argued is the case. 56

     In his influential 1896 essay, "On the Limitations of the Comparative Method," Boas began with the observation that the unilinear schemes and "comparative method" of social evolutionary theory logically require that like institutions in different historical or geographic locations must have like antecedents. But contrary to this logical entailment of social evolutionary theory, there was copious evidence, Boas argued, that like institutions from different social orders often had unlike antecedents. In addition, social evolutionary anthropologists had not taken sufficient care to demonstrate that multiple cases of a like "invention" were truly independent of each other: by failing to establish "independent invention," they risked counting the same piece of data more than once in support of their generalizations. Boasian anthropology contributed at least one other key argument to the formation of a cultural anthropology set against social evolutionary theory. Through painstaking linguistic analyses, Boas and his students concluded that the languages of supposed primitives were as complete, complex, and capable of abstract and logical expression as their own. Cross-cultural differences in language and thought were not trivial, but were not scalable matters of "development" either.⁹² By this evidence, there were no primordial, or even "early," peoples living on earth. 57

     Building on these tendencies in the Boasian tradition, in 1934, at the very moment when many campuses were establishing Western Civ survey courses, Ruth Benedict argued that the spread of "Western Civilization" was due only to "historical circumstances" and did not represent a developmental trajectory. It followed for Benedict that "the West" needed to be understood as one particularity among many, rather than as the exemplary case of sociocultural development. "The understanding we need of our own cultural processes," wrote Benedict, "can most economically be arrived at by a détour"—specifically, a detour by way of a robustly comparative study of humanity that eschews any exclusionary distinction between civilized and noncivilized peoples.⁹³ 58

     Yet while Benedict's Patterns of Culture demonstrates that there were intellectual alternatives to the grand narrative of Western Civ textbooks at the very moment of their ascendancy, it would be greatly misleading to suggest that the Boasians succeeded in removing social evolutionary thinking from anthropology or even their own work, much less from secular knowledge considered more broadly. One difficulty for their critique was its origin primarily in a single disciplinary tradition, while social evolutionary thinking, by contrast, had salience and sources of renewal outside of anthropology, both within and beyond the academy. This is, I would suggest, a general condition of work in the human sciences. With scant exceptions, our concepts are always already in wider circulation. Moreover, the illusion of the defeat of a given theory within a disciplinary tradition may provide cover for its ongoing reproduction in scholarship itself: a scholar who knows that social evolutionary theory is a "dead horse"—a "Victorian" one at that—will likely be inattentive to its ongoing circulation and its many faults. In this sense, I offer my readings of contemporary textbooks, both Western and World, as a cautionary tale that warns us that social evolutionary thinking remains in secular knowledge and schooling, notwithstanding the discrediting of it as a named theoretical position within disciplinary anthropology. 59

     Indeed, encapsulated in the distinction between prehistoric and historic times, social evolutionary understandings of human difference have been dispersed into the very division of scholarly labor that shaped—and shapes—both anthropology and history. To express the matter in this fashion is not the same as saying that social evolutionary ideas traveled from anthropology into history. James Harvey Robinson and his successors certainly made use of social evolutionary anthropology, and it seems fair to say that they were even influenced by it. Yet more than it represents the influence of Victorian anthropology, the crystallization of social evolutionary thinking in the "new history" and subsequent "civilization" textbooks reflects and furthered an academic division of labor that distinguishes "anthropology" and "history" along the lines of the binary division of the long chronology into "prehistoric" and "historic" times. This division of academic labor between the two disciplines, as evidenced by their perduring associations with particular sets of "world areas" and "peoples," means that both disciplines have been, and remain, located in what might be termed a social evolutionary complex.⁹⁴ 60

     At the same time, also important for the perdurance of social evolutionary theory has been its movements across genres and levels of historical writing, from Robinson's scholarly essays into undergraduate textbooks. However much historical and anthropological scholarship is shaped by location within a "social evolutionary complex," it is also the case that scholarship in both disciplines contains powerful resources for unsettling social evolutionary thinking. At the very least, if our textbooks were held to the same standards as monographs or articles in refereed journals, there is a greater likelihood that robust critical reflection about these ideas would enter into the texts themselves. A second major source of the perdurance of social evolutionary ideas thus lies in the protection afforded them by the contemporary separation of scholarship from teaching and, more specifically, by the pervasive condescension in the academy toward the work of producing and teaching these textbooks. 61

     But are there, one might ask, alternatives to the social evolutionary plot of these textbooks? Is it not simply a fact that "we today" live more "civilized" or "evolved" lives than did the earliest homo sapiens, however much we may dislike the allegorical uses of social evolutionary narratives?⁹⁵ No one can deny, of course, that "we today" live very different lives than did the "first humans," even given how little is really known about those very distant ancestors. Yet let us note how much the apparent truth of human social evolution—of "progress," in some sense of the word—depends not on immersing ourselves in history but in stepping back from it, so as to replace our perception of history's complexity with a clear line drawn between two pre-scripted points or staged moments: "human origins" and "modernity." Consider, for instance, how much less self-evident social evolution appears if we identify humanity's origins not with the absence of all the institutions and things that are familiar to us, and on which we are so dependent, but with complexities largely unknown to us.⁹⁶ Or alternatively, consider how much less self-evident is this line if we shift, even slightly, the latter-day site that we select as exemplary of "modernity": Who among us would be comfortable with the claim that the earliest homo sapiens lived less civilized, or even less "evolved," lives than did people in Nazi Germany? Or, to displace and pluralize our sense of "modernity" in a different way, what about persons living today in Amazonia who find eroded and eroding further their liberty to live by gathering, hunting, and swidden agriculture? Must they, too, concede the undeniability of human social evolution at this moment in history? And more to the point here, must their views be excluded from the "world history" we teach our students?⁹⁷ 62

     To resist their exclusion does not require that we adopt the romantic view that Others' lives are better than ours, any more than vice-versa. All that is necessary is that we recognize the contingency of any and all historical outcomes and, in response, that we robustly bracket our sense of already knowing the trajectory of human existence. Some thirty years ago, while convening an international conference on "hunters and gatherers," Richard B. Lee and Irwen DeVore observed that whether industrialization will "end up" being a long-term trend in human existence or a momentary exception is not something we can know in advance of a future that has yet to be made: 63

It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly . . . unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself. If he fails in this task, interplanetary archaeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology and society leading to rapid extinction.⁹⁸

But it is not just uncertainty about the future that should motivate us to stop giving our students narratives that privilege one history among many as the universal history of humanity. After more than a century of "Victorian anthropology"—circulating in a great many forms of knowledge—we have ample evidence that much harm is done to real people by presenting as signifiers of "prehistory" images of contemporary, darkly pigmented persons living in Africa. It is time, then, to reject these textbooks.

     To adopt this position is not to call for an impossible inclusiveness, as if we could somehow narrate all human histories. Rather, it is to call for experimentation with alternative narrations of human difference in time, based on other principles of exclusion and inclusion. More specifically, my analysis calls for textbooks that tell students that, whatever point in time we select as a point of departure for our narratives of the human past, we are never ever outside of history. All of human existence, and not just a privileged subset of it, must be treated as historical, in the important senses of involving both contingency and agency, and requiring, on our part as historians, attention to context.⁹⁹ To adopt such a view will, moreover, destabilize any sense we have that we know how to tell history "from the beginning" and thus "in full." It will thereby re-open for us the question of just how far back in time we need to go in the pursuit of particular educational and scholarly projects. The analysis I have presented suggests, as well, that we need textbooks that do not divide and diminish humanity by parsing it into the "civilized" and "pre-civilized"; textbooks that encourage students to examine, rather than presume, this violent binary of modernity; and textbooks that deploy comparison to highlight the contingency of the familiar and to historicize, rather than naturalize, generalized social types and the social orders we encase within them. And finally, in keeping with all these points, let us not forget that we need textbooks that locate the lives of twentieth-century people who gather and hunt in chapters on the twentieth century, rather than in chapters on the time "before civilization." The scholarly and intellectual resources to begin such experiments in textbook writing are available to us today. The challenge is to use these resources to produce a robust marketplace of ideas in textbook publishing, so as to overcome the dreary uniformity available to our students now.
64

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Daniel A. Segal is a professor of anthropology and historical studies at Pitzer College. He received his PhD in 1989 from the University of Chicago, where he studied with George W. Stocking, Jr., David Schneider, and Raymond T. Smith. Since 1995, he has served as editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology. He is the co-author (with Richard Handler) of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture (1990), the editor of Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization (1992), and a member of the editorial board of History of Anthropology. He has published extensively on the social construction of race and nationhood, and on the politics and cultures of knowledge. The research for this article unfolded in conjunction with his world history survey course over the last decade. For more on that course, see his website, pitzer.edu/~dsegal/.

Appendix

     Textbooks Published in the 1990s Examined for This Study
     Chambers, Mortimer, Raymond Grew, David Herlihy, Theodore K. Rabb, and Isser Woloch. The Western Experience. 6th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.
     Chodorow, Stanley, MacGregor Knox, Conrad Schirokauer, Joseph R. Strayer, and Hans W. Gatzke. The Mainstream of Civilization. 6th edn. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
     Craig, Albert M., William Graham, Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, Frank M. Turner. The Heritage of World Civilizations. 4th edn. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997.
     Duiker, William J., and Jackson J. Spielvogel. World History. Minneapolis: West, 1994.
     Hunt, Lynn, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith. The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1995.
     Kagan, Donald, Steven Ozment, and Frank M. Turner. The Western Heritage. 5th edn. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.
     Kishlansky, Mark, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O'Brien. Civilization in the West. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
     Civilization in the West. 2d edn. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
     Kishlansky, Mark, Patrick Geary, Patricia O'Brien, and R. Bin Wong. Societies and Cultures in World History. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
     Lerner, Robert E., Standish Meacham, and Edward McNall Burns. Western Civilizations, Their History and Their Culture. 12th edn. New York: Norton, 1993.
     McKay, John P., Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler. A History of World Societies. 3d edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
     McKay, John P., Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler. A History of Western Society. 5th edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
     Spielvogel, Jackson J. Western Civilization. St. Paul: West, 1991.
     Western Civilization. 2d edn. Minneapolis/St. Paul: West, 1994.
     Stavrianos, L. S. A Global History: From Prehistory to the Present. 6th edn. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.
     Stearns, Peter N. World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity. 2d edn. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
     Stearns, Peter N., Michael Adas, and Stuart B. Schwartz. World Civilizations: The Global Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
     Strayer, Robert W., Robert J. Smith, Robert B. Marks, Sandria B. Freitag, Donald C. Holsinger, Lynn H. Parsons, James J. Horn, and Joe B. Moore. The Making of the Modern World. 2d edn. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.
     Upshur, Jiu-Hwa L., Janice Terry, James P. Holoka, Richard D. Goff, and Bullitt Lowry. World History. St. Paul: West, 1991.
     Wallbank, T. Walter, Alastair M. Taylor, Nels M. Bailkey, George F. Jewsbury, Clyde J. Lewis, and Neil J. Hackett. Civilization: Past and Present. 8th edn. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
     Winks, Robin W., Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher, and Robert Lee Wolff. A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present. 8th edn. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Notes

This article is dedicated to George W. Stocking, Jr. It was completed while I was in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1998–1999, and I am grateful for the financial support provided to the center for my fellowship there by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SBR-9022192). For thoughtful comments along the way, I thank Donald Brenneis, Matti Bunzl, Edmund Burke, Carl Caldwell, Dipesh Chakrabarty, James Clifford, Christopher Connery, Nancy Cott, Virginia Domínguez, Takashi Fujitani, Jan Goldstein, Bryna Goodman, Akhil Gupta, Gail Hershatter, Richard Handler, Lynn Hunt, Alexander Keyssar, Pieter Judson, Donald Lamm, Harry Liebersohn, Julia Liss, George Marcus, Stuart McConnell, Douglas Northrop, Benjamin Page, Kenneth Pomeranz, Vicente L. Rafael, Dorothy Ross, Hilda Sabato, James Scott, Patricia Seed, Laurie Shrage, George W. Stocking, Pauline Strong, Anna Tsing, Gregory Urban, G. G. Weix, Lora Wildenthal, Gary Wilder, Brackette Williams, R. Bin Wong, Sylvia Yanagisako, Mei Zhan, as well as the anonymous reviewers for this journal and its editor, Michael Grossberg.
¹ Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 20.
² As Gilbert Allardyce has documented, the teaching of "Western Civ" survey courses at the introductory level in colleges and universities became established only after World War I; see Allardyce, "The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," AHR 87 (June 1982): 695–725. While more global variants of and alternatives to this course began as early as the 1940s, they have become much more prominent over the last quarter-century. For a fuller account of this history, beyond what it is provided below, see Daniel A. Segal, Educated Pasts: The Accrediting of Race and Social Evolutionary States in "Western Civ" and "World History" Textbooks (forthcoming).
³ See also Pierre Bourdieu, "Systems of Education and Systems of Thought," International Social Science Journal 19 (1967): 338–58; Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, R. Nice, trans., 2d edn. (London, 1990); John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago, 1993).
⁴ Biographical sources on Robinson include Harry Elmer Barnes, "James Harvey Robinson," in American Masters of Social Science, Howard W. Odum, ed. (New York, 1927), 321–408; Luther V. Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson (New York, 1946); James T. Shotwell's obituary of Robinson in the AHR 41 (1936): 604–06; J. Selwyn Schapiro, "James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936)," Journal of Social Philosophy 1 (1936): 278–81; Harvey Wish, "James Harvey Robinson and the New History," intro. to the 1965 edition of Robinson's The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook (New York, 1965), v–xxix. Robinson's importance in the history of the Western Civ survey course is a central thesis of Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 695–725. My account of Robinson's role in this history both draws on and, on points of evidence and interpretation, disagrees with Allardyce's.
⁵ In researching this issue, I have looked only at English-language historians.
⁶ For discussions of Robinson and the "new history" in the context of the history of disciplinary history, see John Higham, History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 104–16; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), chap. 4; Robert Skotheim, American Intellectual History and Historians (Princeton, N.J., 1966), 66–82; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991), 216, 313–14. The central text in Robinson's own efforts to claim and define the "new history" is New History; other relevant works in Robinson's corpus are discussed and cited below.
⁷ Ross is an exception here; see Origins of American Social Science, 216, 313–14. In terms of my concerns with Robinson's relationship to the formation of the Western Civ survey course, it is important to note that Allardyce says nothing about Robinson's understanding or representations of human time.
⁸ Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty," AHR 100 (June 1995): 601, esp. n. 2.
⁹ George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987); Thomas Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley, Calif., 1987). The phrase "the revolution in human time" is from Stocking.
¹⁰ Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan, 221.
¹¹ On the ethnological and philological projects of tracing the human family tree back to the Flood and thus the very moment of human creation, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 2; and Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan, chap. 4. The phrase "physical history" is from the title of the classic work of pre-Victorian ethnology, James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813). See Prichard, Researches, George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. (Chicago, 1973).
¹² On Enlightenment discourses of civilization, see Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (New York, 1973), 219–58; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 1; Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (New York, 1962), chaps. 1–2.
¹³ Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 326.
¹⁴ On the relationship between social evolutionary theory and both Darwin's thought and the reception of Darwin, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, chap. 5.
¹⁵ On the criteria for the inclusion of words and citations in the OED, see John Willinsky, Empire of Words (Princeton, N.J., 1994). The OED largely avoided terms that were restricted in their circulation to a technical, professional, or disciplinary sphere. On the emergence of the term "prehistory" within archaeology, see Alice B. Kehoe, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (New York, 1998).
¹⁶ Oxford English Dictionary, 1st edn., s.v. "Prehistory" and "Prehistorian," emphasis added.
¹⁷ As something that is not present in the available record, the relative disinterest in the long chronology within disciplinary history prior to Robinson is not something that can simply be pointed to or demonstrated. Some indications can nonetheless be identified. In Herbert Baxter Adams's exhaustive report, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities (Washington, D.C., 1887), we find only one mention of either the long chronology or prehistoric time. Adams tells of a singular "experiment" at Johns Hopkins to provide beginning undergraduates a "course of introductory lectures on the Origin of Civilization"; Study of History, 201. In England, such figures as William Stubbs, Edward Augustus Freeman, and John Richard Green appear not to have grappled with, or had their historical vision greatly disturbed by, the "revolution in human time." Philippa Levine reports evidence of a friendship between Freeman and E. B. Tylor in her study of shifting relations between antiquarians, historians, and archaeologists, and she recognizes explicitly the importance of the long chronology for the emergence of a disciplinary divide between archaeology and history. It is thus striking that she does not discuss any reactions of Victorian historians to the long chronology. See Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. 26, chap. 7; for other relevant accounts of historians at this time, which by their own silence on the topic register the lack of a strong reaction to the long chronology within disciplinary history, see Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, Ohio, 1985); J. R. Hale, The Evolution of British Historiography (London, 1967), 262–300.
¹⁸ Consider the original dates of publication of the following works of social evolutionary anthropology: E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865); Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (1871); Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871); Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877).
¹⁹ On Robinson's forging of the "new history" as a "movement," see Higham, History, 111, as well as the biographical sources given in note 4. Robinson's students included Harry Elmer Barnes, Carl Becker, Will Durant, Dixon Ryan Fox, J. Selwyn Schapiro, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Preston Slosson, and Lynn Thorndike. For fuller lists, see Barnes, "James Harvey Robinson," 338; and Richard Hofstadter, "The Department of History," A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University (New York, 1955). Robinson's service on committees concerned with the teaching of history included but was not limited to the Committee of Five of the American Historical Association of 1911 and the Committee on the Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education appointed by the National Educational Association. On Robinson's service on professional committees, see Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson, 52–64.
²⁰ For an account of the meaning and prevalence of this notion in Robinson's milieu, particularly between the turn of the century and World War I, see George Haines and Frederick H. Jackson, "A Neglected Landmark in the History of Ideas," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34 (1947): 201–20. For Robinson's views on the relationship of history to other disciplines, see his New History, 70–100. See also the comments of Preserved Smith, a Robinson student: Smith, "The Unity of Knowledge and the Curriculum," Educational Review 45 (1913): 339–45.
²¹ Robinson, New History, 239–40, see also 26, 55–59; James Harvey Robinson, An Outline of the History of the Intellectual Class in Western Europe (New York, 1915), 3–4. Ross identifies Lester Frank Ward as Robinson's source for this image; Origins of American Social Science, 313, n. 29. For a variant of this rhetorical figure also used by Robinson, see New History, 22.
²² James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1907–08), 1: iii.
²³ See Robinson, New History, 24, chap. 5. Among the "traditional" beliefs that Robinson subjected to some scorn was Christianity; for a student's remembrance of this, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, In Retrospect: The History of a Historian (New York, 1963), 34–35.
²⁴ For this view of the practitioners of "historico-political science," see Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 68–72.
²⁵ Overall, it would not be too much to say that Robinson's "new history" figured science as central to "history" and thus made it a topic for historians. This strand of Robinson's "new history" is extended significantly by his student, Lynn Thorndike, a founding figure of disciplinary history of science.
²⁶ Crane Brinton, "The New History: Twenty-Five Years After," Journal of Social Philosophy 1 (1936): 134–47. Of the items on Brinton's ironic list of what might best be termed "the exotic-ordinary," the whiffletree is, today, particularly obscure. For the record, a whiffletree is a "pivoted swinging bar to which the traces of a harness are fastened and by which a vehicle or implement is drawn"; Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary. Brinton similarly captured and ironized the expansiveness of the "new history" in the title of a subsequent essay, "The New History and the Past Everything," American Scholar 8 (1939): 144–57.
²⁷ Robinson, New History, 240, 58, 240, 154; History of Western Europe, 4; James Harvey Robinson, "'The Fall of Rome,'" in New History, 154–94; "'The Principles of 1789,'" in New History, 195–235.
²⁸ On the kinds of social acts that can be performed with pronouns, see Michael Silverstein, "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description," in Meaning in Anthropology, Keith Basso and Henry Selby, eds. (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1976), 11–56; Pauline T. Strong, "Exclusive Labels: Indexing the National 'We' in Commemorative and Oppositional Exhibitions," Museum Anthropology 21 (1997): 42–56. On the ways cultural notions of time and persons constitute such relational groupings as "predecessors" and "contemporaries," see Clifford Geertz, "Person, Time, and Conduct," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), chap. 14.
²⁹ On the prevalence of exceptionalist understandings of the American nation and its past among social scientists and other historians of this same moment, see Ross, Origins of American Social Science; and Ross, "Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing." We should keep in mind that even when the exceptionalist discourse opposed "American" and "European," there was also a strong sense that (unmarked) Americans and Europeans shared an encompassing racial identity; there was, in short, a racialized limit to the exceptionalist divide.
³⁰ That the now familiar, if not clichéd, narrative of the West's civilizational lineage was not established as a disciplinary object or school subject prior to this period is suggested, in particular, by the evidence in Adams, Study of History; for a discussion of what we find there in the absence of courses on "Western Civ," see Segal, Educated Pasts, chap. 2. On the notion of "the West" and its civilizational lineage at this time, see Christopher GoGwilt, "True West: The Changing Idea of the West from the 1880s to the 1920s," in Enduring Western Civilization, Silvia Frederici, ed. (Westport, Conn., 1995), 37–62; see also Thomas Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization (New York, 1997).
³¹ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edn., s.v. "Civilization" (London, 1929); this entry was preprinted as a separate work and provided "as a fitting token" to "the Founder Subscribers of the new Britannica"; see James Harvey Robinson, Civilization (London, 1929), 7. See also Robinson, New History, 145.
³² Brinton, "New History: Twenty-Five Years After," 144.
³³ Robinson's Introduction to the History of Western Europe (New York, 1904) covered "medieval and modern" history, and The Development of Modern Europe, co-authored with Charles Beard, covered just the modern period. Richard Hofstadter reports that Robinson's single-authored text sold 250,000 copies in its first edition; "Department of History," 224.
³⁴ For Robinson's discomfort over this, see, for example, Robinson, History of Western Europe, 4.
³⁵ The earliest title was "Development of European Culture"; the final title at Columbia was "History of the Intellectual Class in Western Europe." For recollections of this course from Robinson's students, see Barnes, American Masters of Social Science, 375; Hofstadter, "Department of History," 223–24. For the final syllabus at Columbia, see Robinson, History of the Intellectual Class. See also Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 704–05.
³⁶ Robinson, History of the Intellectual Class, 3, 40.
³⁷ Robinson, History of the Intellectual Class, 3.
³⁸ Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 703–06.
³⁹ For evidence of the general form and local variants of the War Issues Course, see Frank Aydelotte, Final Report of the War Issues Course of the Student Army Training Corps (Washington, D.C., 1919).
⁴⁰ Contemporary Civilization staff, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization: Syllabus, 2d edn. (New York, 1920). Allardyce writes that Robinson's 1915 "class syllabus forecast the outline of the Contemporary Civilization course," and then in a note directs readers to compare the two documents; yet, as I have indicated, the comparison betrays his claim here. Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 705, esp. n. 31. My own account, like Allardyce's, relies on a syllabus published in 1920; I tried unsuccessfully to locate a 1919 edition of this document, and presume that Allardyce's use of the 1920 text indicates that he too was unable to obtain an earlier version.
⁴¹ Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 703.
⁴² Lynn Thorndike, A Short History of Civilization (New York, 1926); Harry Elmer Barnes, The History of Western Civilization (New York, 1935); Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World (New York, 1937); A. E. R. Boak, Albert Hyma, and Preston Slosson, The Growth of European Civilization (New York, 1938); William Bossenbrook and Rolf Johannsen, A History of Western Civilization, 2 vols. (1939), 1; Wallace K. Ferguson and Geoffrey Bruun, A Survey of European Civilization (Boston, 1939); Preserved Smith and Lynn Case, A Short History of Western Civilization (1940); John Geise, Man and the Western World (New York, 1940); Arthur Watts, A History of Western Civilization (New York, 1941); Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture (New York, 1941).
⁴³ For the period prior to 1887, we can turn to Adams, Study of History, for a comprehensive account of what textbooks were in use for history courses; for the first decades of the twentieth century, Hendricks provides a list of widely used textbooks covering either "European" or "general" (or "universal") history, in the course of discussing Robinson's role as a textbook author; see James Harvey Robinson, 68–69, 74–75.
⁴⁴ On the narrowing of the scope of courses, see Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 700–03.
⁴⁵ This was the feature of these new textbooks that had been most anticipated in the earlier textbooks authored or co-authored by Robinson.
⁴⁶ On the texts listed in note 42, the one that departs most from a straight Western Civ narrative is the earliest work, Thorndike's Short History of Civilization. In its extensive accounts of the history of science, Thorndike's text emphasizes the importance of Islamic centers of learning between the Fall of Rome and the end of the fifteenth century. The absence of any comparable geographics digressions from textbooks after Thorndike suggests how quickly the Western Civ genre was codified.
⁴⁷ Arthur Cross, "The Department of History," The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1944), 619–20.
⁴⁸ Boak, Hyma, and Slosson, Growth of European Civilization, v, 5.
⁴⁹ Barnes, History of Western Civilization, v–vi.
⁵⁰ For a broader discussion of the use of constructions of time in the constructions of Others, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983).
⁵¹ Barnes, History of Western Civilization, 42–43.
⁵² On the use of opposition and negation in the construction of Others, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, R. Needham, trans. (Boston, 1963); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), esp. 45–49.
⁵³ Barnes, History of Western Civilization, 68.
⁵⁴ Allardyce, "Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," 706.
⁵⁵ For two prominent examples of the wider circulation of this view, see Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York, 1997), 116–17; and Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston, 1996), 57. To Levine's credit, although he accepts Allardyce's overall narrative, he astutely recognizes the logical inadequacy of Allardyce's analysis, noting that the widespread adoption of the Western Civilization survey course was not an immediate response to the war but took place throughout the 1920s and 1930s. "It would be a mistake," Levine concludes, "to attribute the attraction of Western Civ primarily to international factors." Strikingly, Allardyce's view has even made its way into a contemporary Western Civ textbook. In its preface, The Challenge of the West tells students: "Many American universities introduced Western civilization courses after World War I. Their intent was to explain what the United States had in common with its western European allies, that is, to justify American involvement in a European war." Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenswein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith, The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age (Lexington, Mass., 1997), vii.
⁵⁶ See Harry Liebersohn and Daniel A. Segal, "Introduction," in Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization, Daniel Segal, ed. (Tucson, Ariz., 1992), xi–xix. On the importance more generally of anxieties and doubts about the civilizational status of Europeans for discourses of civilization, see Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900 (Stanford, Calif., 2000).
⁵⁷ Thorndike, Short History of Civilization, v.
⁵⁸ Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, preface to the rev. edn. (New York, 1941), ix.
⁵⁹ Burns authored eight editions of Western Civilizations before his death in 1972 at seventy-five; the publisher, W. W. Norton, subsequently lined up two new authors, Robert Lerner and Standish Meacham, to revise the book. Standish Meacham, interviewed by the author by telephone, September 2, 1997. Donald Lamm, discussions with the author, autumn 1998, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Lamm served for a time as Burns's editor at Norton and was Norton's chief executive from 1978 to 1996.
⁶⁰ Eleanor Burns Larson (daughter of Edward McNall Burns), interviewed by the author, tape recording, the former home of Edward McNall Burns in Santa Barbara, California, November 30, 1997.
⁶¹ No biography of Burns exists. The narrative given here is based primarily on my interview with his daughter. It is also informed by my discussions with Don Lamm, the extant correspondence between Burns and his editors at Norton (which are housed in the W. W. Norton collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University), and a telephone interview in August 1997 with Henry Winkler (who was a colleague of Burns's at Rutgers), as well as my examination of Burns's published writings.
⁶² On the increased "cosmopolitanism" and secularism of American intellectuals from the 1930s through the 1960s, see David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
⁶³ Burns, Western Civilizations (1941), xix.
⁶⁴ Mark Silk, "Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America," American Quarterly 36 (1984): 65–85.
⁶⁵ On the distinctiveness of this aspect of these textbooks, relative to previous accounts of civilizational progress, see Daniel A. Segal, "Civilization without Kinship" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, Pa., December 1998).
⁶⁶ In 1910, less than 5 percent of the college-age population went beyond secondary education; for 1920, the accepted figure is just over 8 percent; for 1930, it is over 12 percent; and for 1940, it is nearly 16 percent; see Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States, 1890 to 1940, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 6537 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), fig. 2. On the arrival of Jewish students on U.S. campuses in the decades prior to World War II, see Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, esp. 67.
⁶⁷ Attempts to produce and market a work that would be like a Western Civ text but more global go back at least as far as T. Walter Wallbank and Alastair Taylor's Civilization: Past and Present (Chicago, 1942). Yet it is really only in the last quarter-century that a significant number of undergraduate-level "World History" textbooks have been written. Prior to 1984, there were only five such textbooks, but between then and 1999, thirteen have been published. For a fuller discussion of the publishing history of these two genres of textbooks, including a catalog of works and their editions for both genres, see Segal, Educated Pasts.
⁶⁸ For a list of "Western Civilization" and "World History" textbooks published in the 1990s that I have examined, see the Appendix. By my best calculations, during the 1990s some 300,000 copies of these works were in use by undergraduates per year, with 170,000 being "Western Civ" texts and the remainder, "World History" texts. For these calculations, see Segal, Educated Pasts.
⁶⁹ Stanley Chodorow, MacGregor Knox, Conrad Schirokauer, Joseph R. Strayer, and Hans W. Gatzke, The Mainstream of Civilization, 6th edn. (Fort Worth, Tex., 1994), xviii.
⁷⁰ Peter N. Stearns, Michael Adas, and Stuart B. Schwartz, World Civilizations: The Global Experience (New York, 1992), xxviii.
⁷¹ Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O'Brien, Civilization in the West, 2d edn. (New York, 1995), 4. The cognate sentence in Kishlansky et al.'s "World History" text ends with "appeared," thereby removing the reference to "Jesus," presumably to make the sentence less particularistic; see Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, Patricia O'Brien, and R. Bin Wong, Societies and Cultures in World History (New York, 1995), 2.
⁷² William Duiker and Jackson Spielvogel, World History (Minneapolis, 1994), 4.
⁷³ See, for examples, Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, prologue; Kishlansky, Geary, and O'Brien, Civilization in the West, 4–7.
⁷⁴ For the concept of "the educated person," see Bradley Levinson, Douglas Foley, and Dorothy Holland, eds., The Cultural Production of the Educated Person (Albany, N.Y., 1996).
⁷⁵ The notion that hunting and gathering is an objectively distinct mode of production that characterizes a distinct human type and distinct "peoples," such as the "Bushmen," has increasingly been called into question. See Alan Barnard, The Kalahari Debate: A Bibliographic Essay (Edinburgh, 1992).
⁷⁶ Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilizations, 15, see also 189.
⁷⁷ Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, xxxix. The credits at the end of Challenge of the West give the photographer as Marjorie Shostak, author of Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). The woman who appears in the photograph is not identified. Thomas Martin, the author with primary responsibility for this section, told me he suggested the use of this photograph to "the art person hired by the publisher . . . based on having seen it in anthropology texts." Thomas R. Martin, interviewed by the author by e-mail, July 9, 1996. That many of today's textbooks use the !Kung to illustrate prehistory and the time "before civilization" is indicative of the significant circulation of materials from Harvard's multi-year Kalahari project.
⁷⁸ Chodorow, et al., Mainstream of Civilization, 6.
⁷⁹ Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, xxxix.
⁸⁰ For a discussion of the productivity of gathering and hunting, and for a critique of the view that they are distinctively constrained by necessity, see Marshall Sahlins's definitive essay, "The Original Affluent Society," in Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), 1–39; for a study that documents the way hunting and gathering actively intervene in and shape "nature," see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); on the complexity of responses to agriculture on the part of hunters and gatherers, see, for example, Roy Grinker, "Images of Denigration: Structuring Inequality between Foragers and Farmers in the Ituri Forest, Zaire," American Ethnologist 17 (February 1990): 111–30.
⁸¹ Hunt, et al., Challenge of the West, xl.
⁸² Chodorow, et al., Mainstream of Civilization, 7.
⁸³ T. Walter Wallbank, et al., Civilization: Past and Present, 8th edn. (New York, 1996).
⁸⁴ Wallbank, et al., Civilization: Past and Present, chaps. 8, 9.
⁸⁵ The Heritage of World Civilizations is distinctive among "World History" textbooks in that it does include a brief discussion of the relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. state during the nineteenth century, although on the whole the text does not depart from the pattern of coverage of Native American histories that I have outlined here. Albert Craig, et al., The Heritage of World Civilizations, 4th edn. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997), 784.
⁸⁶ Chodorow, et al., Mainstream of Civilization.
⁸⁷ One important strategy for displacing this entrenched sequencing and emplotment of "the industrial revolution" has been to construct narratives that highlight the dependence of the English and European experiences on various elsewheres, thereby representing industrialization as globally dispersed, rather than as national or continental "cultural goods." See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
⁸⁸ To see the pattern of who is added as an author when publishers produce a "World" text from a previously published "Western" ones, compare Kishlansky, Geary, and O'Brien, Civilization in the West, 2d edn., with Kishlansky, Geary, O'Brien, and Wong, Societies and Cultures in World History; and compare Jackson J. Spielvogel, Western Civilization (Minneapolis, 1991), with Duiker and Spielvogel, World History. The Kishlansky et al. "World History" volume is listed as authored by Kishlansky, Geary, O'Brien, and Wong "with" five additional authors. Of these, one contributed additional material on China, two contributed material on the Middle East, another contributed material on Africa, and the last contributed material on Latin America. The lesser billing given to these authors indicates accurately the lesser attention given to these additional parts of the world, and of course, the patterns of coverage and exclusion are complex. One needs to consider, for example, the uniform absence from these texts of contributors with expertise about Oceania or Native Americans, as well as the selection of topics within, say, African or Latin American history. For an insightful discussion of the exclusion of African histories from "world history" in the works of a number of major historians, see Steven Feierman, "African Histories and the Dissolution of World History," in Africa and the Disciplines, Robert Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr, eds. (Chicago, 1993), 167–212. The phrase "people without history" was, of course, famously ironized by Eric Wolf; Europe and the People without History.
⁸⁹ For examples, see Daniel Segal, "Discovery in the Text: The Making of 'Races' in the Undergraduate 'Western Civ' and 'World History' Textbook," in Commemoration and Critique: Essays on the Politics of Historical Representation, Pauline T. Strong, ed. (Durham, N.C., forthcoming).
⁹⁰ Stearns, Adas, and Schwartz, World Civilizations, 387.
⁹¹ Sahlins, "Original Affluent Society," 1. The quotation is taken from Sahlins's brief discussion of a quite similar pattern of dismissing difference in economics textbooks and "treatises on development."
⁹² For an exemplary and highly influential text in this strand of Boasian anthropology, see Franz Boas, "On Alternating Sounds," American Anthropologist 2 (1889): 47–51.
⁹³ Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934; Boston, 1959), 5, 56.
⁹⁴ In effect, I am suggesting that disciplinary history has been defined, at least in part, as the study of historic time and its contents, as distinct from prehistoric time and its contents. By contrast, a more established view tells us that disciplinary history was founded not on a particular understanding of human time but on the increased use of "documentary materials and source criticism," to quote Doris Goldstein. The alternative I am proposing situates disciplinary history more in relation to the coeval division of academic labor between disciplines and less in relation to antecedent work by so-called amateur historians. For the more established view, see Goldstein, "The Professionalization of History in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Storia della Storiografia 3 (1983): 3–27; Jann, Art and Science of Victorian History, epilogue.
⁹⁵ The position that my overall argument falls apart in the face of the "undeniable" fact that "we today" live more "civilized" lives than did the earliest human ancestors was cogently argued by one of the anonymous reviewers for this journal; I thank that reviewer for her/his willingness to engage views that s/he found so patently wrong-headed.
⁹⁶ For an example of such an attempt, see Lévi-Strauss's comments on human "origins," in "The Concept of Primitiveness," in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago, 1968), 351.
⁹⁷ For how one such group, the Pajonal Ashéninka, view civilarse ("civilization"), see Hanne Veber, "The Salt of the Montaña: Interpreting Indigenous Activism in the Rain Forest," Cultural Anthropology 13 (August 1998): 384. According to Veber, the Pajonal Ashéninka represent an unusual case of effective organizing by Amazonian peoples to sustain indigenous practices of production while engaging civilization.
⁹⁸ Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, "Problems in the Study of Hunters and Gatherers," in Lee and DeVore, Man the Hunter, 2.
⁹⁹ On this point specifically in relation to Africa, see Joseph C. Miller, "History and Africa/Africa in History," AHR 104 (February 1999): 9.

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