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riverofhistory · 5 years

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Episode 1: Dissecting the Past

The following is the transcript for the first episode of On the River of History.

For a link to the original podcast, go here.

The podcast will now be hosted here. This episode has now been split into 4 parts for easier listening.

Part 1

Greetings everyone and welcome to the very first episode of On the River of History. I’m your host, Joan Turmelle, historian in residence.

In this series, I will be taking up the task of explaining the history of the world. As any historian may tell you, it is never an easy job and it is certainly never one that will be truly complete. Put basically, there is just so much to tell and so many ways to tell it. While I am devoted to my goal of keeping this series holistic in scope, it may be inevitable that some parts of the story will be left out.

In preparation of this series, I had gone through several different options for how I wanted to tell this story. One way was an old-fashioned route: going through a complete nation’s history from past to present and then onto the next nation and starting the same process over, much like Will and Ariel Durant or Henry Cabot Lodge. Another way was to focus on geography: staying on one continent, going through the history of all the societies that were birthed there and moving on, a method similar to the work of Ralph Linton or Glenn King. In the end, I settled on a compromise.

Our journey on the River of History begins with the formation of the Earth and the subsequent origin and evolution of living things. Afterward the focus will shift to just one organism, that being (of course) our own species Homo sapiens. Following humanity’s spread across the world and the various ways in which different peoples adapted to the ice ages and their aftermath, the series becomes slightly episodic. While always moving forwards in time, I will be jumping from various geographic locations, tracing different societies as they develop and change. For example, in the story of China’s history, I will discuss the rise of states and the Shang Dynasty, before leaving to focus on another region, but in time I will return to China to discuss what happens next. And this will continue further and further forwards towards modern times.

As far as what will be discussed itself, I do not intend to just simply talk about the basics of a nation’s rise and fall or single out major events like key battles. When relevant interest arises, I will take the time to discuss the different aspects of a historic society: breaking down the intricacies of its art, language, belief systems, architecture, and science, as well as notable individuals.

Indeed, the river is vast, and we will sail it together.

For all intents and purposes this episode acts a sort of prologue. Before we jump into the main narrative, I’d like to spend some time talking to you all today about historiography. This is the study of how historians look at and record history, be it that of their home nation or of the globe. In doing so, I hope to share with you all just how complicated it can be to write a history of, anything really. There are many ways to do it, and they all have their pros and cons.

But now comes the million-dollar question: what is history? In analyzing the various aspects of historiography, I hope to be able to provide an adequate answer.

We often divide our past into two parts: history and prehistory. Prehistory, as the etymology suggests, is the time before history. So then, where is that cut off point? The most common definition is that history begins when people started writing down records of events in their lives. As such, many historians tend to focus on documents, records, and journals: anything that can be traced to an individual or many at some point in the past who can be named and perhaps traced to a living lineage. These can be found among families who have held onto these documents, or they can be found in places of worship, banks, libraries, and museums. So, in a sense, history would be tied to the practice of writing.

With this in mind, we recognize that history would have begun at different times for different societies. The people of Egypt created hieroglyphics around 5,300 years ago. Sumerian cuneiform developed from earlier pictorial systems around a hundred years later. In present-day Pakistan, the people who settled along the Indus River Valley created a script (still undeciphered) 4,600 years ago, and the Minoans of Crete made an equally undeciphered script 3,900 years ago – though these latter two may have arisen from contact with the peoples of Sumeria and Egypt. The written word did not see the light of day in the Americas until 2,400 years ago, probably among the Olmec. China gave us the last independently created writing system roughly 4,500 years ago. Over time, as peoples and ideas moved across the world, so too did their writing systems, slowly changing and developing into new forms. Thus, the histories of those different societies could officially begin.

In keeping with this concept, we must also recognize that many peoples around the world would not have had their own histories because they never developed writing. For the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Guinea, much of the other Pacific Islands, most of the Americas, and in vast regions of Africa and Asia, their histories came when outsiders (primarily Europeans) introduced writing to them. In keeping with a good definition for history that we want to work with, should this be so? I say, no.

As many indigenous peoples will tell you, there are other ways of recording the events of the past. Oral traditions are words and stories transferred by speech. These have often been dismissed by historians and others, on the assumption that a) they are unreliable because of the nature of human communication, essentially working like one long game of telephone and b) they can only go back a few generations. But continuing work with first nations peoples are shattering those assumptions.

Take aboriginal Australians, for instance. Linguist Dr. Nick Reid and colleague Patrick Nunn have worked with various nations throughout the island continent and were able to analyze 18 oral histories and stories. They tell of times when the continent looked different from the present day: The Great Barrier Reef was originally connected to the mainland of Queensland and the Wellesley Islands near Carpentaria formed a sharp peninsula. What fascinating the researchers was not so much the stories themselves, but these tidbits of information preserved within them. It is nothing new to historical geologists that Australia’s coastlines looked very different once upon a time: with the growth and decline of the great glaciers of the northern hemisphere during the ice ages, the sea level rose and fell in tow. Parts of the coastline originally extended for hundreds of miles and New Guinea and Tasmania belonged to the same landmass. For living aboriginal Australians to keep memories of these environmental changes in their stories means that their oral histories extend not for centuries, but for thousands of years. Dr. Nick Reid has estimated that the oldest of these histories could be at least 10 to 12,000 years old.

The situation is similar for indigenous Americans too. The Klamath, who live in present day Oregon and California have an oral history of a large volcano that once erupted, later collapsing and becoming what they call giiwas, but we you may know as Crater Lake. Geologists, again, are very familiar with the formation of Crater Lake: like many such phenomena, after the caldera cools rain falls and slowly fills the crater until it turns into a lake. This particular event has been dated to 7,700 years ago and that means that the Klamath have retained this cultural memory in their stories for that long.

It is clear that oral traditions can be just as accurate and just as informative as written records. I have just spoken of the memories of geologic events. But that is just a small fraction of the knowledge preserved in this manner. There are tens of thousands of myths, medicines, recipes, natural histories, agricultural techniques, chronologies, and other aspects of society that have lasted millennia.

I think the point has been made. Whether written or spoken, history should not be so clear cut as this. Besides, though both methods are valuable in their own ways, they can be prone to issues. It cannot be denied that biases have always be present in many historical records. Sometimes, people lie or do not recall things clearly. Sometimes there are contradictions between different texts that report on the same events. Sometimes not enough information on a particular battle or ceremony of holiday was not collected, and the author was forced to make up details. Places names are recorded but never their locations. Documents may lack signatures or dates. Perhaps most frustrating of all, the livelihoods of one nation’s people can be observed and recorded by representatives of another neighboring nation. Should these nations be in conflict with each other, those records may be biased and even derogatory. And the historian is left to figure out fact from farce. What then?

Part 2

There are other tools that a historian can use to unravel the past and indeed the following three methods have provided some of the richest (and in many cases the most accurate) details.

Archaeology is the study of past peoples and their societies from a purely material perspective. Despite what you may think or have heard, archaeologists are not concerned with prehistoric animals, like the popular Mesozoic dinosaurs: that is the domain of the paleontologists (though the two fields share many methods). The historical evidence an archaeologist is looking for is in the earth and soil, where time and environment have overtaken the hands of workers and warriors and buried them away. What an archaeologist may find is nothing more than scraps (indeed, there is a technical term for a garbage dump – they’re referred to as middens), but on many occasions are the rewards breathtaking. Entire cities buried in sand, horse-drawn chariots with horse and chariot still attached, beautiful frescos, and even long lost written documents. If I’m making things sound romantic, you’ll have to forgive me, much of archaeology’s early history was treated this way, often by people who sought recognition or a source of personal riches. Interspersed among these individuals were dedicated researchers who truly wanted to know the past like the back of their hands.

In the deepest ways, archaeologists face a tougher time reconstructing the past than traditional historians. The impression is given that a researcher working with scraps or pottery shards or fragments of wood has little to imagine or even work with. Thankfully, archaeology nowadays is blessed with a rich back catalog of past sites and societies. One fantastic resource, for example, are the Human Relations Area Files which include a database of archaeological traditions that can be used by students and researchers (and I will put a link in the show notes). Many archaeologists have become specialists of a particular time period and locality, so what may look like useless pebbles to the layperson can be like diamonds. And if any artifacts happen to me in poor shape, they’re kept anyway for future students. They may yet be diamonds themselves.

Though the technology has changed dramatically, the methods of archaeologists have more-or-less remained constant. First and foremost, appropriate permission must be given by government officials or anyone else involved – sometimes sites are found by accident on a person’s property, sometimes a construction project has to be delayed for fear of destroying a historic site. Because their targets are underground, the next step in an archaeological project is to do a survey of the area. Sometimes an old map or document must be consulted for clues on what to expect. Often a site is much too large to be seen from the ground and drones or helicopters need to be used to fully observe a site. In the air, the team can conduct photographic or geophysical surveys: mapping out the land from above and looking for anything that might aid the eye. During a survey, it helps to plot out the desired excavation site onto a grid. This can be done with simple tools like string and posts of wood or nails. This ensures that any artifacts found are identified with their locations in the place they were originally buried. If you want to reconstruct a historic site accurately, or even understand the circumstances that led to a site’s demise, it helps to know where you found everything exactly.

Archaeologists nowadays rarely excavate entire sites unless absolutely necessary. The process is long, costly, and inherently destructive. Rather than simply pick up a shovel and start digging, all possible excavation sites need to be carefully planned out and singled to the most appropriate spots as determined by the previous survey work. Then the work begins, digging vertically through parts of the soil and dirt to reveal any layers present. These layers correspond to specific points in time. The farther down you dig, the older the remains or, alternatively, the youngest layers are the newest: this is the law of superposition. At all times there are workers cataloguing recovered specimens, creating drawings and taking photos of the excavation process, and generally recording any information recovered. Often there are conservators on site as well, developing strategies to best collect fragile objects like pottery shards or thin human bones. Timing is key: some archaeological sites are lifelong projects with researchers returning every few years or so, while others come and go depending on what restrictions on time are present. The site of Little Egypt in Georgia (preserving Native American burial mounds from the Pre-Columbian period), was only excavated twice before the construction of a local dam resulted in the site being flooded in and destroyed.

Archaeology offers a materialistic look into the human past that is often missing from traditional historical practices, and when brought together sometimes the two can corroborate and expand our understanding. More often than not, the two can also cancel each other out: usually it is the work of archaeologists that run historical records afoul. The anonymity of the subjects is prevalent as well. When you’re dealing with periods of time that extend far beyond written records it’s impossible to know the names of any individuals found. Their careers and stories of demise, sure, but never their names. Not to mention the names of societies as well. Archaeologists have had to provide technical names to now lost cultures, because they’ve been gone for so long that no one survives to inform us about what those people called themselves. In this series, when I use names like Solutrean, Mississippian, or Afanasievo, I’m referring to archaeological terms, not the actual names of the societies themselves.

Linguistics is the study of languages and historical linguistics concerns the evolution of languages and how much (or how little) they have changed. Nowadays, learning a language is easy and most countries today provide education for students wishing to learn any number of world languages. Back in the past, however, languages were often tied to specific societies. Whenever a people had to move, they brought their language with them. Sometimes they came across new aspects in the places they traveled to or ended up inventing a new tool that had to be named. This was the way that new words were created, and these would have been taught to the younger generations, eventually becoming a basic part of the lexicon. In other cases, when peoples spread to new lands they conquered and subsumed the local populations. If these people were to be integrated into the dominant culture, it made sense to teach them the dominant language too. If the process is forced enough, the local languages may become extinct, but there were occasions when subjugated or enslaved peoples were able to incorporate the dominant language among their own: thus keeping their original tongue alive in a modified form. These creole languages eventually developed into full languages in their own right. In the era of European colonization, several creole languages formed, with the most familiar being those among enslaved Africans in the Americas. Languages can also have cognates: these are words that share a common ancestor. Sometimes cognates stem from related languages, but they can also derive from completely unrelated languages too. The word for ‘hurricane’ in English was created from the Spanish ‘huracán’, which itself stems from the Taino name for the god of hurricanes ‘Juracán’. The Amerindian language of the Taino peoples, called Arawak, is as distantly related to Spanish as Spanish is from Mandarin Chinese. Cognates can be found everywhere. But there can also be false cognates as well: two words that seem to be related in a common origin but are actually completely different.

So, what does this all have to do with history? Simply put, when you study a language, or two, or three, you are reading the work of hundreds or thousands of years. The presence of certain words can reveal what sorts of items were used or what animals and plants past peoples encountered. Historical linguists are also faced with the task of analyzing and classifying languages, trying to find the familial relationships between them. They have recognized that Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese share enough features that they belong to the same language family, called Romance. Similarly, Romance languages are similar to Osco-Umbrian languages. This is a family that includes historic languages spoken in Italy that are now mostly extinct, but we have records of them from documents. So, the two families are grouped together in an even larger family called Italic. And you can take it even further. By grouping languages in this way, researchers can reconstruct the evolutionary history of languages, and because in these pre-modern times societies and their words were often closely knit, the past movements of peoples can be deduced as well. It’s not the most exact method and many studies trying to tie languages to the movement of peoples have since been debunked, but it offers an accompanying body of information that, save for written documents, would otherwise be lost.

The last method, and perhaps the newest (relatively speaking) is the use of DNA or Deoxyribonucleic Acid to study the past. All humans, indeed, all living organisms on Earth, use DNA to house the genetic material needed to grow and reproduce. The field of biology has advanced tenfold in recent years, and the process of collecting and sequencing an organism’s DNA is pretty mundane stuff. What fascinates scientists is the information that is available in DNA, and what it can tell us about the past.

Nearly all DNA sequences contain differences between each other, the result of copying errors during the process of DNA replication. These mutations remain in the genetic code, and when an organism reproduces, those mutations can be transferred from parent to offspring. Often a mutation does nothing in particular; sometimes it alters the way a gene is displayed; other times it can prevent a gene from functioning. When a mutation changes how a gene is expressed, it can have consequences on the organism that houses that genetic code. If the mutation provides a benefit for the organism, like it helps the animal or plant survive in its environment, then there is a likely chance that the mutation will be transferred again once that organisms reproduces. And so on, until that change is present in the entire population. I’ll be discussing the ramifications of this process in a later episode, but for now I want to illustrate why this process is important for the historian.

In an individual’s genome (that is, their complete genetic code) there are a multitude of different mutations that have accumulated over time through that person’s family history. Compare two people’s genomes and you can see how much of their DNA are similar or different to each other. Biologists have been able to work out the average rate of mutations in human beings, and so they can examine two people’s genomes and see how long it has been since those family lines diverged from one another. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the basic idea is there. Human geneticists have now studied the DNA of millions of people (from the past and present) and have been able to build enormous data sets that analyze the population histories of human beings. People are notoriously messy, however, and populations have often interbred with one another. This the traditional historian, as well as the layperson, knows too well: we live in a vastly interconnected global ecosystem, and it is nothing for two people separated originally by vast expanses of land and water to meet up and start a family. And the opposite end of the relationship spectrum is unfortunately present as well: years of study of historic societies have demonstrated a sickening trend of warring nations raiding a settlement, killing the men, and sexually assaulting the women. In time, the subjugated women give birth to children, and those children will eventually grow up and start their own families. All of this complex history of genetic mixing can be found in human genomes, and researchers have been able to reconstruct the past movements and intermixings of populations. They have even been able to discover demographics of people who no longer exist in an uncontacted form. Again, I will be elaborating on these discoveries in later episodes.

Historic documents and records, archaeology, historical linguistics, and human genetics. The story of the human past, and the methods used to uncover it, has never been as rich and as fascinating as it is right now.

Part 3

It’s easy to think about the past hour, or the past day, or the past week. Extend your reach and the month will be familiar too. Continue on to a year and then gaps will appear in your memory. The further you go back in time, the difficult it is to remember what occurred. Such is the issue of the historian who wishes to understand the events of the past. Many individuals from several different societies have developed calendars that help us make sense of everything, but even then, there is room for disagreement.

The most commonly used calendar in the world is the Gregorian Calendar. Named for Pope Gregory the 13th. In 1582 AD, he established the calendar as a replacement and an update to the older Julian Calendar, which itself was the creation of Julius Caesar in 46 BC. Both calendars had the same purpose: the year was divided into 12 months, with the months at their current lengths. However, the Julian Calendar originally reduced the actual solar year by 10 minutes. Trivial? Perhaps. But from its inception, the Julian Calendar gradually began to slow down the passage of time. Every three years, a leap day had to be added as an attempt to correct this. However, the years continued to shorten, until the time of Pope Gregory, when Christmas Day was now 10 days behind schedule. As Christmas was seen as an important day, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, it was urgent that something be done. Thus, Pope Gregory sought to reform the calendar and institute his own. The difference? Those 10 unnecessary days were removed, and the leap day was added every four years, on February 29. Our last leap year was in 2016 and the next will be in 2020. This reform greatly improved the accuracy of counting the years and was widely accepted among the Catholic Church. It took two centuries before the Protestants made the switch, and now most of the world uses the Gregorian system, save for some of the Orthodox churches.

What makes the Gregorian and Julian Calendars unique are the way they divide the past. Both calendars officially start in 1 AD, that is, Anno Domini (a Latin phrase meaning in the year of our Lord). Thus, we are currently in the year of our Lord 2019. All times prior to 1 AD are labeled with BC, which means in basic English “before Christ”. The decision to start the date in 1 AD stems from the work of Dionysius Exiguus, a monk of the Eastern Roman Empire, who developed the system in 525 AD. It is currently unclear as to why Dionysius argued that Jesus of Nazareth was born on 1 AD, but no matter how he came to that conclusion, we now recognize that he was mistaken. The work of biblical scholars and other historians have argued that the most accurate date for the birth of Jesus was sometime in the year 4 BC (and no, it would not have been on Christmas). That is the current consensus, so both calendars are technically flawed in this respect. Despite this, the Gregorian Calendar is the most accurate method for calculating time as it closely matches the actual solar year and there are no signs that it will be replaced any time soon.

But others have tried. In 1993, geologist Cesare Emiliani created his Holocene Calendar. He recognized the accuracy of the Gregorian Calendar and its system of leap years, but he was concerned that the recognition of a ‘year of the Lord’ posed a philosophical problem for historians. While the life of Jesus and the advent of Christianity were (and are) important events in their own right, in the grand scheme of human history highlighting this date of birth is, to put it as polite as possible, arbitrary. Many regions around the world did not have any means to recognize this era, nor would they have known of Jesus himself: in the Pre-Columbian Americas, for example, it can be argued that the effects of Christianity wouldn’t take part until Christopher Columbus and his men forcibly placed them upon the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean after 1492 AD. Then there’s the inconsistently of the lack of a year 0. There is no 0 BC nor 0 AD: it goes from 1 BC straight into 1 AD. It’s a strange mathematical situation.

As a better and more holistic solution, Cesare Emiliani’s calendar begins roughly at the start of the Holocene Epoch, the time in the geologic history of the Earth to which we currently live. The International Commission on Stratigraphy recognizes the beginning of the Holocene at 11,700 years ago, but Cesare’s calendar extends to 12,000 years ago (it is based on an earlier calculation). Within this period of time, all of human civilization developed, from the earliest agricultural projects and community structures to the modern age. Thus, Cesare argues, the beginning of the Holocene is a more noteworthy start to a calendar. In essence, 10,000 years are added to AD dates, and BC dates are to be subtracted from 10,001. That makes our current year 12,019 of the Human Era (this is the calendar’s Anno Domini), and also gives us a year 0.

It’s a nice system, in this historian’s opinion, and others have made attempts to gain the calendar more acceptance. But for now, it’s a niche calendar.

Moving on to the other concerns in understanding time, we recognize that our calendars only work to a limit. When a historian finds a document that was written before the advent of the Gregorian or Julian Calendar – that is, another calendrical system is used or just none at all – they have to find a means to place the true age of the document in its place. Archaeologists face this issue too. Nearly all of their finds lack signatures or dates, so they have to find other ways to calculate their true age.

In the study of time, there is relative dating, and there is absolute dating. Relative dating is elementary: as I have previously described in my discussion of archaeological methods, artifacts and settlements buried in the uppermost layers of the ground are younger than those buried below them. Archaeologists can excavate many items from several layers and then place these in a row and trace their development over time. Flinders Petrie, an Egyptologist working at the beginning of the 1900s, famously cataloged hundreds of preserved Egyptian pots and placed them in an intricate system from oldest to newest. In doing so, he was able to identify any pot that came his way just from its shape and form alone.

Absolute dating is more precise, and its methods varied but always based upon the rate of decay of atoms.

In radiocarbon dating, samples are recovered from organic materials like wood, bone, coal, and hair. Chemists recognize that carbon-14 is taken in by plants during photosynthesis, where it is converted into oxygen. These plants can be ingested by animals that will eventually die, or the plants will die on their own, or the wood from trees is cut and re-purposed into furniture or housing, which will eventually be destroyed by rotting or by fire or whatever. In any case, the exchange of carbon for oxygen ceases, and the carbon-14 undergoes decay at a known rate. The half-life of carbon-14 – the time when half of all the carbon has decayed – is 5,730 years. The older a sample is, the less carbon-14 it has. And this can be taken back 50-40,000 years, when nearly all of the carbon has broken down. By taking organic samples, archaeologists can measure the rate of decay and determine how old the samples are and these can be checked against our own calendar for precision.

The other method is potassium-argon dating. Here the situation is similar: potassium atoms decay at a known rate, only this time they develop into a new atom, argon. Samples have to be uncovered in volcanic rocks in order for potassium-argon dating to work, but the method is great for remains as old as 4.5 billion years. As you might guess, this is one of the preferred methods of archaeologists concerned with the earliest humans and their ancestors.

There are other methods as well, but I’ll leave you all with these for now. It is important to recognize that historical records do not have to end with writings or even oral traditions; they can be extended as far as the beginnings of the Earth. Historians today have access to a larger set-piece than they previously had.

Part 4

I’ve spent a while talking about how historians find out about the past, but now I must discuss what we do with this information. While it is one thing to study human history in order to know when events occurred, many people have made attempts to find meaning in it all. The questions beg: why does our history matter? What can our history tell us about ourselves today? What was the causation or chain of events that led to event x happening? Is there a natural progression to history, like some underlying process of growth or progress? Can a study of historic happenings help us predict future events? These are deep and loaded questions, but that has not stopped historians.

One of the most familiar attempts to reveal hidden truths to history was by historian Arnold J. Toynbee in his 12 volume work A Study of History. This was a major book series, with the first volume published in 1934 and the last not seeing the light of day until 1961. Through an exhaustive comparison of world civilizations, Toynbee attempted to find a set lifestyle for society. He imagined civilizations like living organisms: being born, reaching adolescence, experiencing a peak age, and eventually declining into unrecognizability. Toynbee argued that the key to a civilization’s success was in the efforts of what he called “creative minorities”, who were essentially rulers that sought solutions to any issues facing the societies they oversaw. If the issues threatening a civilization were at the right caliber (just shy of insignificant, but far below apocalyptic), then they can be overcome, and the society grows. If the opposite occurs, and a civilization’s leader ceases to come up with good solutions, then that nation simply faces desolation. Toynbee’s study of history relied on a supposed notion that all civilizations share a form of destiny. Ideas like destiny are ambiguous matters: there is no hint that the future is written in stone and no way to test that idea scientifically. Many critics have pointed this out among their reviews, and so Toynbee’s view of history has faded into obscurity.

The writer H. G. Wells, familiar to many through his science fiction work, completed The Outline of History in 1920, right at the end of the first World War. His outline was just that: a rundown of the events of the past. One of the larger overarching themes in Wells’ book was that the history of humankind was marked by a near ubiquitous goal of creating the most beneficial and most educated societies. Over time, different nations slowly drew themselves together through alliances, and there was be a steady path that culminated towards a single nationality, humanity. War, famine, poverty, nationalism, and prejudice would have to be fervently abandoned, while reason, science, and compassion be embraced wholeheartedly. One world religion, one education system, a democratic political system, and a single economic system that benefited all. This vision of utopia was common among many twentieth century authors, as the horrors of World War 1 provoked many into wishing for a better future for humanity. Indeed, some even argued that this Great War would be the last major war and that their vision of a perfect world was on the horizon. While there can be no doubt that a brighter future for the human species is a noble goal, the failure of H. G. Wells and of the other utopian authors laid on the circumstances of the world history that happened following WW1. Instead of the “Modern World State”, they saw the Great Depression and the ten-fold devastation of WW2. The vision of world history as a road to utopia was quickly expunged, and by the time of the final revised edition of H. G. Wells Outline of History in 1971, the final chapter became sharply agnostic and worrisome.

Nikolai Berdyaev, a philosopher, released The Meaning of History in 1923. His analysis was, in the end, rather pessimistic. He saw history as an endless series of human failures and that any attempts at achievement were doomed to fail as well. Likewise, the historian Oswald Spengler saw that the outcome of all world civilizations was decline and death; like Toynbee, he suggested that societies had natural lifecycles and elaborated on that idea in his 1918 book The Decline of the West. In an honest and thorough examination of world history, it is truly difficult to find any indication that societies truly die at all. While many distinct cultures have certainly seen their day, aspects of those cultures have survived to the present day. Take the Phoenicians, for instance, who no longer dominate the Mediterranean and its trading routes but have provided the world with the modern alphabet.

Most of these attempts to find an overarching theme to world history have not succeeded, but there was at least as many attempts to uncover the lessons of history. I, like many historians, would agree that there are valuable things to learn from an understanding of the past. One of the most famous and continuously repeated quotations regarding this matter comes from a Spanish philosopher, George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” These words derive from a volume of Santayana’s book The Life of Reason from 1905-1906. Admittedly, the quote has been reproduced many times into different forms, but the meaning is generally the same. What Santayana was arguing was that human beings should look to events of the past to see what has worked and what has not, so that they do not make the same mistakes twice. The usefulness of this philosophy can only work so far, because in principle it relies on the suggestion that human affairs are predictable. If something is done one way and had this outcome, then if repeated the outcome will be the same. Many philosophers have debated the truth of this matter: how exactly can we be sure that things really play out in this way? What about “third times the charm”? These are questions that historians have debated fervently, especially when political parties and their followers suggest solutions that have been attempted in earlier times to little avail.

What about the notion of progress? Progress is defined as the improvement of some aspect of life. Many have argued that history has an inherent progress, and that human societies naturally follow a path from primitive to advanced. Things have steadily improved and the world of the 21st Century is a better place than any other period in history. On the surface this seems to be true: human life expectancy has risen over the years; the birth rate is higher than the death rate (so children are actually surviving through childhood); literacy rates have increased; education is now available for more youth; and so on. However, there are cracks in the façade. Certain aspects of human existence are improving, but our global environment is failing rapidly. The world’s natural resources are in decline; wild populations of plants and animals and their habitats are being wiped out with no replenishment; not to forget the rise in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that is warming our atmosphere at such an alarming rate that vast populations in Africa, India, and the Pacific Islands are dying due to their effects. The oceans are swamped with microplastics and are gaining acidity and many parts of the land are no longer viable for agriculture. Human beings have created a healthier and well-educated population, but they’ve also disregarded the natural environment that this same population depends on. What measure then is this supposed progress, if all that we’ve gained can so easily be taken away in the coming decades? Human beings have bit the hand that fed them, and that hand is their own.

Some historians have more or less abandoned any suggestion that progress is something that can be measured, or even something that matters. Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has provided a strong counterargument to the idea that there is a progression from primitive to advanced: he writes “Strictly speaking, ‘primitives’ do not exist: all of us are the products of equally long evolution.” Groups of uncontacted peoples in the Amazon, subsisting on foraged meals, are on equal ground with the citizens of São Paulo, the most populated city on Earth. These Amerindian peoples have lasted as long as their Latinx neighbors: when you travel back in time far enough, you find a common ancestral population that started with the same circumstances. Similarly, one could argue that periods of time in the past were better than modern times: see the various arguments by archaeologists about the apparently better health of pre-agricultural groups than their farmer descendants. A foraging lifestyle is difficult, and starvation was often at your doorstep, but at least you didn’t have to worry about arthritis, cavities, or monocultural diets. Progress is at best illusionary: as a concept it is useless to the historian and it is not a view that I will be subscribing to in this series.

I’ve discussed the various ways in which historians can know the past, and I’ve followed with a rough and patchy look at how those same historians have attempted to make sense of this knowledge. But what about you, the listener? If my presumption is correct, you’re listening to this series in the hopes that you will gain some insight into the history of the world, or at least you’re here because you genuinely like history as a topic. I enjoy history because of the doors that it opens. The worlds of the past offer a far more enriching experience than any imaginary world, in my opinion. In a fictional setting, any and all of its laws and causations are already set in stone. Everyone has a name, every place has a known location and system of rules, and every event has an explanation. Historic times do not have this luxury. The farther you go back in time, the more difficult our understanding becomes. There is always a sense of mystery here. There are details that are still unknown, details that may never be known. The past is enticing and exciting.

That’s why it saddens me to see world history treated with such carelessness by both young and old. In many polls, history classes are among the least popular subjects among students. Some schools have even removed history as a compulsory subject, relegating it to an elective. National histories are often given precedence over world history, and while it is certainly valuable to know the history of the nation to which the students belong, most of the time those classes are swamped with nationalism and falsehoods. Key facts about historic individuals and events are inaccurately told and these errors are repeated through textbook after textbook. The complexities and nuances of battles or political debates are downgraded into “good vs. evil” stories as if they were fairy tales. Lists of dates and names are required to be memorized, but teachers often fail to give explanations as to why these records are important in the first place. Then comes the issue of so-called “great-man” history: the idea that all the events of the past were the result of singular men (and it is usually always men) and the actions they took to change their world. Any historian can tell you how difficult this view is to hold in light of a proper understanding of the past. It’s not so simple. There is rarely (if ever) any role of Socratic discussion in these classes – textbooks treat the historical narrative as a series of facts that are to be regurgitated. Concerned and responsible individuals are working to change this, and there are some beautifully rich resources out there for students of history, but there is still much work to be done.

The famous musician Sting offers a curious recount of his time in history class: he said “I once asked my history teacher how we were expected to learn anything useful from his subject, when it seemed to me to be nothing but a monotonous and sordid succession of robber baron scumbags devoid of any admirable human qualities. I failed history.”

History is important because it is our shared heritage. It is the accumulation of millennia of individuals with now unknown names who were able to adapt themselves to their environments and then create their own habitats. Despite the distances, peoples around the world fostered beautiful and rich cultural traditions that have slowly changed over time and influenced each other. There were times of dread and death, but these were punctuated by periods of hope, hope that always kept people inventing and exploring and creating. That you are here right now is the result of an endless chain of individuals who survived despite the odds. A proper history of the world can do more than recount the stories of the past, it is a chance to answer questions about the present, and the future. The issues of our times, the circumstances that led to the development of all our conditions, the reasons that peoples and nations act the way they do, all those quandaries are available to you when you explore world history. That is what history is.

With all this being said, what makes me qualified to talk to you about the history of the world? I’m a United States citizen of Puerto Rican and French-Canadian heritage. I’m a transwoman and a secular humanist. I have never left the United States or its territories. My experiences are not universal to all people, not even members of my own family. Why should I speak for Earth?

This is the same problem that faces all historians around the world. Some solved the problem by collecting their peers together to tell the story – so that no single voice takes prominence. Most world history books or television productions are the result of work by multiple people from various backgrounds and historic fields. Singular authors of world history do exist, of course, but to complete their task they have often found themselves having to move beyond their sphere of life in an adventure of “thinking outside the box” and often the results fail due to personal prejudices slipping in anyway. With an appropriate use of cultural relativism, a historian can understand other past societies. Not to the level of the people who actually lived there and experienced the world in their own ways, but just enough to give an honest voice. Physicist Nigel Calder offered the analogy of looking at world history “like a Martian”. That is, separating yourself from all your personal opinions and identities and looking around the world as if you had never been born on this planet. Each new society and culture is a learning experience, like being in kindergarten again. In this light, everything – from politics to science to the arts – are given a new perspective and a new light. From there, you can gain new understanding, not just of others, but of yourself, and tell the story of humanity in an enlightened way. That is easier said than done, but it can be done.

We may look different, believe in different things, live in different places, but we all belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. With this recognition in mind, I will use the humanity I share with all of us to tell the greatest story of all time, the history of the world.

And with that, we must lay anchor to our river journey. On the next episode: we will begin at a time long before humans. Before life on Earth. In order for there to be a world history, there had to be a world, and I will share the long-lost secrets that geologists and cosmologists have revealed about the formation of the Earth and its land and oceans, which laid the foundations for all that we know.

That’s the end of this episode of On the River of History. If you enjoyed listening in and are interested in hearing more, you can visit my website at www.mixcloud.com/RiverOfHistory. A transcript of today’s episode is available for the hearing-impaired or for those who just want to read along: the link is in the description. And, if you like what I do, you’re welcome to stop by my Twitter @KilldeerCheer. You can also support this podcast by becoming a patron, at www.patreon.com/JTurmelle: any and all donations are greatly appreciated and will help continue this podcast. Thank you all for listening and never forget: the story of the world is your story too.

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