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How do Historians conceptualize time?
Cristo
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I'm writing an essay for my history course with that title, and so far I've been thinking about looking at the periodization of History etc. but I'm not really sure on how to take on/handle this question.
It's one of seven titles we can choose from, and it's one of the more vague but I'd like to do it for that specific reason and try to challenge myself but I'm a bit lost.
Do you guys have any advice on where to start with a title like this?
It's a bit frustrating, but I think I'm one of few doing it so I'd like to finish it!
It's one of seven titles we can choose from, and it's one of the more vague but I'd like to do it for that specific reason and try to challenge myself but I'm a bit lost.
Do you guys have any advice on where to start with a title like this?
It's a bit frustrating, but I think I'm one of few doing it so I'd like to finish it!
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You could look at how much has changed over the last 60 years thanks to the invention of scientific dating techniques. Carbon 14 dating is the most famous and earliest but there have been a huge number of downright ingenious methods invented in the last half-century that have allowed for objective dating of an accuracy that a previous generation thought (and rightly so) to be impossible.
I have no idea where you would go beyond that, but my impression is the various eras we are taught do not really acknowledge accomplishments in other cultures. Examples like the Renaissance in Europe basically having happened in various other cultures well before.
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Generally historiography is too meta a topic for my taste.
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Actually quite to the contrary.
The idea of "ages" of history goes back at least to the ancient greeks who had a notion that the world had been steadily getting worse over time. From a "golden age" to a "silver age" to a "bronze age" to the "iron age" in which they lived.
The terms used nowadays (eg: medeival, dark ages, renaisance etc...) generally have different meanings than when they were first coined. But the most common divider tends to be based on either politics (what kind of government was dominant) or economics (how people distributed wealth) - these two being very much connected of course. Not centuries.
Totally came in here expecting to be reading about how time isn't really linear and causality is a myth.
Imagine my surprise!
I like the idea of talking about periods, but you'd really need to work it out. What defines a period (can only major events break up two periods?)? Does a period (Modern, etc) apply to the whole world, or only specific places? Are periods/eras really a meaningful way to divide up time (by which I mean, is the first year of one period really any different from the final year of the last one)?
Another possible direction is whether sequential periods/eras are seen as increasing in "quality" and why.
Last other topic I can come up with is whether it is only possible to define periods retroactively - can a person living in an era meaningfully state when they have entered a new era/when their current one has ended, or can it only be done in hindsight by historians? If it can be done by a person at the time, it suggests that defined periods are meaningful and absolute, but only being able to define them after-the-fact would let you make the case that they are artificial.
That's about all I've got.
Another possibility that comes to mind, if I were writing this, I'd probably try to make a point about historical time being so very closely connected with available historical evidence. As a sort of example of what I mean, consider how if you have a general world history textbook, an early chapter that covers a thousand years may be the same length as a chapter near the end of the book that covers just a decade. Or think about how, in typical Western history education for example, there tends to be a jump more or less straight from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Italian Renaissance with a bit of handwaving about the Dark Ages in between, almost completely ignoring the many interesting things that must have happened during those thousand years, and thereby even making those thousand years seem like much less time than they were in a real world sense.
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Ari the Wise relied a lot on the ancestry of the Icelanders when he wrote Íslendingabók, and through the connecting genealogies arrived at 874 for the date of the settlement of Iceland; tephrachronology and ice core dating has shown that this is pretty spot-on.
So I guess my point is that historians through the ages have conceptualised time through their relation to kings, Jesus and their own community.
I'm not sure if I've answered the question.
This sort of thinking about history goes at least as far back as the Greeks and Romans, who thought of "history" as simply a narrative of events (in other words, like any other story) with a logical beginning, middle and end.
For example, the transitionary period prior to the Victorian era. Honestly, after the Victorians all of the eras overlap pretty heavily so it's less interesting (since everything is known and, often, copyrighted). But I personally find thinking of the transitional periods between defined "eras" to be more interesting to evaluate when it comes to the overall passage of time in history. Because they give a sense of movement and flux.
You should ckeck out The Short Twentieth Century (or the long 19th century).
When someone says "the First World War" most people think June 28th, 1914 as a starting date, or Nov 11th, 1918 as the ending point - but historians tend to discuss the start of the First World War as the rise of Nationalism in the 1890's, construction of Dreadnoughts in the early 1900's to the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 as the trigger. Although the assassination triggered the succession of declarations of war what we know as the war didn't start for another month.
As we go further back in time and dates are no longer part of communal memory - ie. the 1500's dates are given more generically (eg. I said 1500's not 1914) since the recognition of a date precisely 186100 days ago has little meaning. The specific dates are just as important as to the acknowledgment of when an event occurred but not as well remembered by the larger community as such defining terms are made to describe and era with no fixed beginning or end.
The Renaissance as a historical period extends from sometime in the 14th Century to some time in the 16th century but has only rough start and end points due to the historical debate about which events lead to the beginning and end.
So long story short - historians can't decide what starts and stops a period, so they tend to use more generic terms to outline major themes of a period with a degree of flexibility at the beginning and end. In some places the Renaissance was going on, while in others it was still the dark ages.
The first, romanticisation, tends to look at the positives of the past and ignore the negatives or limitations of the period. Examples of this could be the historical tradition of American historians looking at the colonial/puritan period. Another example could be histories of the 1950's in the UK, alot of interviews with people from the time focus upon its 'golden era' post austerity qualities.
The second, teleological errors are errors of logic. A historian can be led into thinking of historical events occuring because of what happened later after the event. The whig tradition of history is the most guilty of this, often proclaiming the primacy of Britain in the 19th century as evidence for why things happened in the 18th century.
There is of course the French Annales school of history, looking at the 'Long Duree'. Ferdinand Braudel has a large 3 volume series that discusses the trends of history following long cycles and trends. Its a traditionally french model but has impacted upon modern historians ideas about thinking of time as a unit.
Additionally, you can look into the work of feminists, post-colonialists and subaltern studies which will look at history not so much as the study of great events or great men but as studies of people often those without voices. This has been the foundation of modern social histories.
There is potential if you are not careful of stepping into the minefield of linguistics and post structuralist writers who arge that you cannot take yourself out of the tpic you are studying and as a result 'taint' your analysis with your own modern voice. Its a minefield but mentioning it in passing as the ultimate growth of conceptualizing time and its rejection by many modern historians as important.
Remember to make sure your analysis goes to a 'deep' level of learning. Not just saying what the evidence or source shows but why that is important to the question and how this impacts upon your own overall conclusions.
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This is more a sociological discrepancy than a concept of time. Japanese or Chinese historians won't rely on this distinction. No one (who knew what they were talking about) would say, "Hideyoshi had a large impact on Japan during the Renaissance." They'll use Renaissance when they're talking about southern/western Europe and the Sengoku Jidai when they're talking about Japan. You could argue the western culture-centric view is true for world history, but that's mostly because we speak English and English has its own associations.
As an example, Wiederaufbau means reconstruction in German (nouns are capitalized). If you refer to Reconstruction in English people will immediately associate it with the period after the American Civil War. If you refer to the Wiederaufbau in German you'll be talking about the period directly after WW2).
Spindizzy has some good information on historical schools of thought, but this may be difficult to relate to the conceptualization of time. Periodization can work; some people here have already mentioned some of the differences between a historian's concept of a certain period and the lay person's concept. Overall, I think the flow of information heavily impacts our concept of actual time.
Events with more immediacy and more information seem to move faster than others. Time in the Greek city-states seems well-defined for multiple centuries because we had historians (who were also active participants) and an abundance of written data, but individual events in the Middle Ages seem to feel more strung out (of course, there tends to be enough information to consistently fill in nearly day-by-day events regionally, but it is comparatively sparse for localized areas).
It's difficult to separate the Battle of Crecy in 1346 with the battle of Agincourt in 1415. They're both part of the Hundred Years War, but the actors have changed within 70 years. That's three generations; it would be miraculous if one soldier managed to be in both, since he would need to be at least 85 years old at Agincourt.
One of my history professors noted that we often define historical periods by their modern immediacy. A colonist in Virginia in 1775 may have concerns about impending difficulties with Britain, but he would have likely considered the defining event in his life the French and Indian War (globally the Seven Years War, arguably the first true World War) up to that point. However, retrospectively the Seven Years War is globally considered less important now than the creation of the United States.
...I wish I got to write about that sort of stuff during my studies.
Yeah I think it's something along these lines I want to go for, the issue of periodisation. In British history it's usually done in terms era of a Monarch - e.g. Victorian, Georgian, Elizabethan eras etc. And I think it would probably be prudent to deal with the problems this brings.
Thanks for the help guys!
Ahh yeah, that is an interesting thought actually. That's definitely something I could look into, thanks.