| "Big"
history is best when it's small. This book is only 92 pages long, plus a
15-page Preface (on how it was made and how to use it), an 8-page "Prequel" (on
the human-free first 14 billion years), a list of resources (4 pages), an
appendix on historical periodization (9 pages), an index (6), an author's
profile (1), and two pages of advertisements for other products of its proud
publisher, Berkshire. That was more than enough to create a major stir among
the subscribers to the AP-World e-mail list this spring. Can the
two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-year history of our exceptionally
self-reverential species, perhaps even more worshipful of its subsets and
subcultures, possibly be compressed into such a modest text, with only three
major divisions? It's true that the history of Homo sapiens sapiens is only about a thousandth part of the history
of our Mammalian order, and less than a sixty-two-thousandth part of the
history of our planet Earth. In this not so fleeting world we might be a
rather fleeting species, but we have certainly been here long enough to matter.
Does this book do the trick? Yes, believe it or not, even against the background
of several centuries of similar efforts, Christian's little book is the
narrative that best meets the growing contemporary demand for a short "big
history." I can imagine a long line of "universal" historians (as they called
themselves), from Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun to Walter Raleigh and Bishop
Bossuet, smiling at Christian's omissions as they try to imagine a humanity
appearing so long before 4,400 B.C. Spengler could sneer, but Toynbee and V.
Gordon Childe ("G" is a typo for "V" on page 101), not to mention Marx, would
nod sagely at Christian's economic fundamentalism. As for the McNeills, father
and son, they are alive to wonder at the book's arresting slimness. No recent
universal historian has come close to such compression, with the possible
exception of Alfred Crosby's 166-page history of energy use, Children of the Sun (Norton, 2006).
Veteran
World historians and teachers will easily recognize Christian's three
chronological divisions of humanity and few will disagree with their skeleton-key
importance, judged economically and socially, if not religiously or
politically. They are, first, the Paleolithic foragers, better known in our
classrooms as the hunter-gatherers of the Old Stone Age; second, the farmers,
dominating the world (and "civilizing" it with cities and letters) from the
Neolithic about 10,000 B.C.E. to the Medieval, sometime after 1,000 C.E.; and
third, the "Moderns," making over the world with the new economies of
large-scale (industrial) production, beginning in China with a false start in
the 11th century, and continuing in the West with an irreversible
leap forward after about 1750 which has lasted until the present and promises
to go on a while longer. From the point of view of Advanced Placement World
History, which does not go much behind the first literate civilizations in
Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Punjab, north China, Nubia and Mesoamerica, the last
two of these three divisions are by far the most important, though a World
History of the Arts, or of Religion, or of Social Relations would be fearfully
incomplete without those thousands of years of foragers, and even World
Environmental History depends heavily on the assumptions we make about them.
Christian is entirely aware of this, and teachers may trust that his appendix
on periodization is a gem of concentrated learning about this very long debate.
Can
students use this book? Quite easily. My sixth-graders in Ancient History get
from the Big Bang to the Paleolithic in a week with no text besides a timeline,
slowing down thereafter to end with the fall of the Roman Republic. I think
they would be delighted with This
Fleeting World. It might also be the pre-reading in the summer before a
high-school World History course. It might be the first assignment in a
college course. It could even be the last, because although it can not easily
reassure students about the details they will have learned, it can reassure
them that they know what drugstore historical novels still celebrate as
history's "sweep" across countries and generations. Despite its compactness,
despite the logical necessity that all overviews have justification,
recognizably religious or ethical, for their points of overview, This Fleeting World is neither
catechistic nor dogmatic; and it invites rather than discourages student
debate. In every chapter, it asks questions, deep but accessible ones, in
boxes, adding a list of questions for research at the end of every chapter. It
has pictures, rather than descriptions, of arts and technologies, and places them
near text suggesting what could be asked about them. The best thing of all
about this book, I think, is that it does not "cover" anything. Instead it
maps it, deploying sparkling prose to entice the student to enlist in her or
his education, to take on the project of finding his or her place in the world
that is, and has been for 250,000 years, so increasingly full of others.
William Everdell, World History Connected's Book Review editor, has been teaching
History at Saint Ann's School (co-ed, independent and non-denominational) in
Brooklyn, New York, for 38 years. His elective for high school juniors and
seniors is World History; but his youngest students are 6th-graders learning
Ancient History and his oldest are in an adult extension course learning the
Constitutional History of the U.S. Presidency. He has three books in print, one
on the theory and practice of republican government since ancient Israel (The
End of Kings, 2000), another on the origins of Modernism in the arts and
sciences from 1872 to 1913 (The First Moderns, 1998), and on
18th-century thought (Christian Apologetics in France, 1987). He can be
reached at weverdell@earthlink.net. |
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