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When the student-scholar examines history, the past, the present, and the future are simultaneously engaged. History is much more than the description and explanation of the documented human legacy. It is a means to explore who we are and who we may become. History offers us opportunities to understand ourselves by disclosing the paradoxes and complexities intrinsic in being human. History is our human identity with all its trials and triumphs, its conflicts and catastrophes. History is us, embracing our politics, economics, aesthetics, our social, spiritual, and cultural relations: our past, our present, our potential as human beings.

The historian is an explorer, always seeking messages and searching methodologies to enhance descriptions and explanations of the past. The writing of history, or historiography, ultimately involves the discovery of knowledge and its interpretation as historical truth. This necessitates the development of discerning faculties especially when evaluating sources. This textbook aims to prepare and promote the student's historical and critical consciousness. Studying history is a challenging, worthwhile endeavor, according to Henri-Irenée Marrou, "a struggle of the mind, an adventure." Welcome to it!

The Importance of Western History in Trans-Cultural Perspective

Western history has been under fierce attack by a variety of critics. Many of them spout arguments that are rash and churlish, especially those that condemn the relevancy of Western Civilization courses with their emphases on "Dead White European Males (DWEMs)." The incontrovertible fact is that the production and proliferation of Western power, knowledge, and identity have played profound and provocative roles in the modern world and will continue to act as significant, if not decisive, global forces in the lives of the students reading this textbook. In part, the idea of a "Wider West" underscores that the history of our civilization has been expansive dating from the Sumerians (c. 3000 BCE). What deserves rethinking, however, is the zealous concentration on Western history that conveniently subordinates or ignores the rest of the world. This book proposes and pursues an alternative "trans-cultural" direction.

A "trans-cultural" approach studies the encounter and interaction of peoples within a civilization, such as the Romans and the Germans, and between civilizations, for example, the Romans and the Han Chinese. It is also a comparative approach which studies cultural and historical similarities and differences. This broadens the historical perspective for the student and, I believe, enriches the traditional Western Civilization course. Indeed, this consideration of a "Wider West" is also pragmatic given our global economy, communications system, and strategic interests. As we enter a new century and a new millennium, a trans-cultural perspective seems not only natural, but also necessary.

Western Civilization's Distinctiveness

It is difficult to demarcate "Western Civilization" geographically. Most people equate being Western with being European, but they forget that our civilization's culture stemmed from ancient roots in the soils of West and Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa. From there Western civilized societies spread into Europe, along the African littoral, eventually into the Americas, and then throughout the world.

Western societies have had two major cultural traditions. One tradition is theocentrism. This means that certain Western societies have had religion (or God [Theos]) as their social center, their social focus. The other tradition is anthropocentrism. This refers to those societies with human beings (anthropoi) and their activities receiving primary attention in social life. This historical legacy has produced a rich occasionally conflictive cultural dialectic, spiritualism v. secularism, religion v. humanism, which has provided Western Civilization with a distinctive dynamic, a conceptual and creative dimension, that has inspired Western imagination and impelled Western development.

While there are non-Western societies with similar cultural orientations, Western theocentrism and anthropocentrism have been unique. Western theocentrism has been dominated by three major world religions that were generated by Western spiritual pursuits and practices: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each religion shares many beliefs, the chief being monotheism (a belief in one God).

Western anthropocentrism, on the other hand, has its roots in ancient Greek culture. Though the expression that "it all started with the Greeks" betrays a Western bias, non-Western civilizations have had impressive humanistic achievements such as China. Greek humanism was significant and stimulating. The Greeks provided the West and eventually the world with theoretical templates for the sciences and the humanities and extolled the possibilities of human knowledge and achievement. That potential is still being explored and recorded.

If you claim to be a member of Western Civilization, you are the inheritor of a extraordinary and exceptional heritage. If you are not from the West, you have probably been influenced by its presence. To be Western is more than being situated in a particular geographic location; it is a mentality, a relationship of self to others, an identity, an imagination.

Philosophy and Philosophers of History

The historian is engaged in hermeneutics, the process of interpretation. The word is derived from Hermes, the Greek messenger god. The historian receives a vast variety of messages or information such as documents and material artifacts, processes s this data, perceives it as interpretation, and transmits it as explanation, as history. The most crucial stage in producing history, or in "reception/perception," is the processing stage of analysis and assessment. This is where the historian trains critical faculties to evaluate information, to separate, for example, reality from myth, and fact from fallacy. Once this stage is concluded, interpretations can be offered as explanations.

The historian is both an artist and a social scientist. History is art; it is highly subjective. Historiography is very personal. Nevertheless, interpretations need to be substantiated by evidence. That is why the student often encounters detailed footnotes and bibliographies in historical writing.

Being a historian is a profoundly philosophical experience. It is impossible to detach oneself completely from the human subject or condition. When the historian studies the past, s/he studies, too, one's own personal existence. Therefore, the historian must be courageous as well as curious, inquisitive, and imaginative, receptive then perceptive.

The nature of history, its direction, its design, has fascinated Western historians. Historians, however, have reached very different conclusions as to the forces driving human events. In many ways, their conclusions are a function of their personal experience, of their time and culture. For example, the recurrence of events during the Peloponnesian War, especially atrocities which devalued the classical Greek character, convinced Thucydides ;(c. 460-400 BCE) that history is cyclical, that it repeats itself. It does this because men (human beings) fail to learn from history; they fail to live with sophrosyne or moderation. Thucydides chronicled not only a war, but also the degeneration of Greek methods and practices. His anthropocentric narrative is a profound illustration of that particular historical tradition. He is, as M Finley related, a "moralist." Thucydides demonstrates that there is something deontological about being a historian, a moral obligation to serve others.

Augustine (354-430 CE) wrote from a different, theocentric, perspective but also presented a similar moral position. He was remarkable man who embarked on a spiritual search that resulted in his baptism into the Christian faith in 387. Reacting to pagan charges that Rome was pillaged in 410 because the Romans had strayed from their polytheism, Augustine retorted that history is part of a divine plan. In the City of God, he distinguishes between the faithful who reside in the City of God and the secularists who belong to the "City of Man." From his Christian perspective, history was not cyclical but linear and teleological; it was heading toward a telos, an end. That end would be the Parousia, or Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Augustine represents the theocentric tradition in Western Civilization and his works introduce centuries of Western societies that would be providentially oriented.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who was born in North Africa and traveled extensively in the Muslim World, can be viewed as a transitional, even modern historian. After invoking the Muslim imperative of recognizing Allah's omniscience and omnipresence, he proceeds to study history in a humanistic way. He viewed history as having two levels. He wrote: "Surface history is no more than information about political events...[but] the inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events." Ibn Khaldun was most interested in the latter philosophical "inner meaning of history." His methodology was modern: "It should be known that history is a discipline that has a great number of (different) approaches. Its useful aspects are very many. Its goal is distinguished." This pluralist interpretation insisted upon "numerous sources and greatly varied knowledge." He applied his philosophy particularly to the study of North African dynasties where he melded political, economic, social, and cultural variables in his historiography. Ibn Khaldun; ranks as a great historian and one who certainly reflects the directions of today's interdisciplinary "new historicism."

In the modern period in Western Civilization, Karl Marx (1818-83) offered a secular teleological philosophy. A product of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, Marx viewed materialism, identifiable with class development, as the source of class conflict which served as the agent of historical action and motion. History would end not with the Second Coming but with a terrestrial "Communism," a classless, federated society, intrinsically cooperative and peaceful. Marx is considered a "metahistorian" since he contended that historical causation can be reduced to one essential or primary explanatory principle (as in metaphysics). To Marx, the agent moving history was dialectical materialism operating through class conflict.

Two other historians, particularly known as metahistorians given their breadth of historical perspective and their depth of philosophical inquiry, offer other interpretations. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) viewed civilizations as inevitably "organic" and seasonal, burgeoning in their "Spring," flourishing in their "Summer," decaying in their "Autumn," and dying in their "Winter." In his two-volume Decline of the West (1918-22), that was influenced by the ghastly Great War (World War I), he feared that Western Civilization was entering its winter period.

Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), in his monumental twelve-volume Study of History (1934-61), presented the "challenge-response" theory. According to his idea, if a civilization failed to respond successfully to challenges, cultural as well as political, it would inevitably decline. Like Spengler, Toynbee feared that Western Civilization was deteriorating, but proposed the organization and propagation of a universal religion, amalgamating ideas from the world's great religions, in order to save or renew not only Western, but also global civilization. Both Spengler ;and Toynbee ;equated materialism with social moroseness, which stifles a civilization's creative and vital spirit.

Two French historians deserve mention especially with regard to the development of contemporary historical methodology. Reminiscent of Ibn Khaldun;, Fernand Braudel (1902-85), an economic and social historian, saw history operating on two levels. On the surface, events happen quickly and dramatically. Nevertheless, this "traditional" historical approach, described by Braudel as "a history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations," which was primarily political and biographical, neglected the "almost timeless history" below the surface, "a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles." An example of his interest would be the study of social structures and economic institutions such as peasant life which hardly changed for centuries. Braudel's interests in a history of "long duration" widened historical methodology by insisting on examining and emphasizing the interrelationships of economics and social structures. These structures generated "mentalities" that sustained themselves for centuries.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) had wide historical and epistemological interests. An admirer of Braudel, he studied the interrelationships between mentalities and identities. He was particularly fascinated how power and knowledge served together to discipline, if not determine, social affairs. For example, Foucault studied the history of the social relationships between the medical community and the insane and the legal system and the prisoner. He had corresponding interests in how society defined itself through spatial relationships and metaphors, symbolized by the hospital, the insane asylum and the prison. Foucault's methodology was pluralistic and profoundly influential.

I offer the student-scholar this syncretic perception/interpretation of historical "movement": History is "elliptical," recurring, but not in the same way, though still moving in a direction, as a result of choice, rational or irrational, secular or spiritual, tangible or intangible. History is the aggregate of choices: the choice to learn from it; the choice to ignore it; and perhaps, the choice to transcend the "ellipse" and create a new human history founded on enlightened, spiritual values. You are not only a part of history, you are history, because when you choose, you make history. You are not contained by impersonal forces of history; you are the force of history by your choice. History is profoundly personal, existential, essential.

Historians can offer only a portion of interpretive or explanatory truth. This underscores the need to extend our historical methodologies and our minds to consider all types of messages, media, "histories." History is always being reworked and refashioned as we also re-imagine and reinvent ourselves. The serious study of history demands a certain engagement beyond facts and figures, a certain understanding that by studying others, we study ourselves. This is critically important, because our past also implies our promise.

Questions:

1. What is meant by "history?"
   
   
2. How is the historian an "explorer?"
   
   
3. What is meant by a "trans-cultural" approach to history? Why is a "trans-cultural" direction practical?
   
   
4. What are the two "centrisms" in Western Civilization?
   
   
5. Compare the philosophies of history of Thucydides and St. Augustine.
   
   
6. What do the modernists, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Braudel, and Foucault, have in common? How are they dissimilar?

Selected and Suggested Readings

Braudel, F. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World of Philip II, 2 vols., (1972).

Dreyfus, H.L. and P. Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983). Valuable analysis surveying Foucault's works including an essay by Foucault.

Finley, M "Thucydides the Moralist."Aspects of Antiquity (1969).

Gardiner, P., ed. Theories of History (1959). Excellent collection of historiography illustrating development of Western philosophy of history.

Hamilton, P. Historicism (1996). A valuable survey emphasizing recent currents in historiography.

Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols. (1968). Monumental and "modern" despite being six hundred years old.

Marrou, H.-I. The Meaning of History (1966). History described as an existential practice.

Tucker, R.C. The Marx-Engels Reader (1978). Particularly valuable since it includes writings of young Marx.

Veeser, H.A., ed.. The New Historicism (1989). Exposition of interdisciplinary approach to history through post-modern critical theory.

White, H. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1987). Uses literary criticism terms to analyze the great historians and thinkers of the 19th century; example of new historicism.

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