History is now at a cross-road, both intellectually and institutionally. The institutional patterns of falling enrollments, falling real wages, and falling employment opportunities are familiar enough. The intellectual problems are just as intractable. I have argued elsewhere (“Span, Depth, and Relevance” AHR, February 1984) that one of the most serious intellectual problems facing the profession is the explosion of knowledge, which has overcrowded libraries and subdivided fields of specialization into ever narrower segments.
One possible remedy is to seek an integrative connection between the specialties. For the journeyman historian, the problem appears at several levels at once. The most practical question is: What should we teach undergraduates? Are the old Western Civilization and American Surveys still adequate as the only history courses most nonhistory majors will ever take? Should we move to a more balanced world history. If so, what kind of world history?
Beyond that is the further question: What should we teach graduate students. How wide a span of general learning? How narrow and specialized should research training be? In the past, we have gone along without much conscious thought about these conflicting claims. Now we find one department after another trying to design new courses for general education only to find that no one in the department actually has the general background or training required to move beyond Western Civ.
Further along, with the doctorate behind him, the historian faces his own choices of how to spend his time—more specialized research to create monographic bricks for the temple of knowledge, or general reading to prepare for communication with a broader, nonprofessional audience. Any historian’s response to these questions may well depend on professional considerations, like getting tenure, but it should also take account of his fundamental assumptions about the historian’s craft.
Historians seem to be trying to answer one or more of three broad questions: How did people come to be as they are? How did the world come to be as it is? And how do human societies change through time? Historians differ greatly in the degree of emphasis they place on these questions.
While answering these three questions, historians should try to reach the nonspecialist, to provide an awareness of how the world came to be as it is. As historians, we may like to think that the pursuit of knowledge in a narrow specialty is ultimately related to under standing historical change. But many of our other attitudes suggest the opposite.
Should we move to a more balanced world history? If so, what kind of world history?
Many of us prefer to teach specialized courses and avoid the general, perhaps believing that it is somehow more noble or meritorious to achieve honor by publishing specialized works than it is to write textbooks. Some departments of history reinforce this belief by having a rule that textbooks do not count toward tenure. This supports the suggestion that specialized knowledge is deep, while generalized knowledge is necessarily superficial.
World history does not require universal knowledge; it requires the same kind of selectivity from masses of data that any other history calls for. A researcher with a specialized topic has to start with a problem he is trying to solve. Otherwise he finds himself taking endless irrelevant notes. Broader knowledge requires the same kind of orienting question or problem as the specialized topic. Practical historians seeking a world perspective can no more bring in everything than a writer of monographs can. They too have to begin with a question they are trying to answer even though the question is not always explicit.
One kind of question that is often used and rarely explicit is simply: “What happened that was important?” It owes something to the older tradition of political history, where the requirements of a political narrative kept the story moving. It also owes a lot to journalism, with overtones of the wire-service slogan that the news is whatever interests the “Kansas City milkman.” This approach turns up in world history courses and texts—especially in the twentieth-century world survey. This is not to condemn twentieth-century surveys out of hand, Many avoid this obvious pitfall and try to ask how the modern world came to be in its present fix.
When they do this, they have in the background other works in world his tory that stay closer to whatever problem their theoretical point of departure may suggest. Cyril Black’s Dynamics of Modernization could serve as one example. There, he seeks to find the meaning of change in the modern world through the systematic and comparative study of “politically organized societies” and their routes to modernization, mainly in this century. His selection from the whole record of the past is very specific and self-conscious, based on a model that is carefully and explicitly laid out. And Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World System is much the same from the side of dependency theory. One may not agree with the theory or the way it is worked out, but both escape the charge of superficiality, because both begin with a principle that makes it necessary to select some evidence at the expense of others.
The “civilization” or culture-area approach also makes its framework explicit, but it tends to use a freer and more amorphous model. The most influential work of this kind is certainly Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, which is also the single most important work in world history to appear in this century. Toynbee deals with the rise, fall, and interrelations of a number of entities he calls societies—or sometimes “civilizations” in contrast to “primitive societies.” The theoretical importance of these entities is so great, indeed, that he spends the first 178 pages of volume one discussing the definition and boundaries of these “species”—the organic entities that are the subject of the next nine and a half volumes.
Toynbee never founded a school of history in the sense that the Annalistes did, originating at about the same point in time. His influence has nevertheless been very broad. William H. McNeill’s Rise of the West is certainly the most influential single-volume world history in recent decades, and it owes a lot to Toynbee’s frame of reference, without accepting all of Toynbee’s emphasis or interpretation, especially, perhaps, leaving out the primacy of religion in the definition of a society.
One way to look at these various approaches might be to imagine a hierarchy arranged according to the degree of abstraction from a theoretical whole. Toynbee obviously aimed at something close to the whole, while McNeill’s Rise of the West takes a part of that. Black’s Modernization leaves out somewhat more, while Wallerstein’s World System takes a different cut through time and space.
Further down the hierarchy come works that aim at a world-historical perspective, but no longer try to represent the whole. Instead, they search the historical record to find patterns of uniformities that recur in particular circumstances. This suggests some aspects of social scientific history, but it is not necessarily recent. The discussion of the nomadic-sedentary conflict in world history—a theme Toynbee drew out—goes back at least as far as Ibn Khaldûn’s account of the rivalries between nomadic and sedentary peoples in North Africa. In this century, the best known extension and elaboration is Owen Lattimore’s Inner Asian Frontiers of China, where he developed important theoretical propositions about nomadic-sedentary relations around the great Asian deserts stretching from the Red Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk.
Several works in this style of comparative world history have appeared in recent years. Michael Adas’s Prophets of Rebellion is one that takes up five rebellions in the non-Western world, rebellions that were both millennarian and contained an element of protest against European rule. They are located in time between 1825 and 1932, not simultaneous perhaps, but in a similar era. In space, they range from New Zealand to German East Africa, with stops in between in India, Burma, and Java. In this study of active culture conflict, the European element and approximate contemporaneity are the constants. The range of rebellious cultures is very wide indeed, from the Polynesian Maori to a variety of different cultures of what is today inland Tanzania. Only Burma and Java can be considered to be even vaguely within the same culture-area or “civilization” of a Toynbeesque kind. The other departure from Toynbee is the fact most of these cultures were examples of the “primitive societies” that Toynbee regarded as hardly within the proper scope of historical study. Adas’s book nevertheless points out a range of similarities and differences that come closer than most works of history to explicit generalizations bearing on the question: How and why do human societies change through time? It is also a far cry from “history as success story,” or the “great events” approach. None of Adas’s rebellions actually achieved its objective. They nevertheless tell much about changing human conditions that more elitist historical accounts simply leave out.
Still further down the hierarchy of abstraction are works that select a bundle of events that has worldwide repercussions. European imperialism in the late nineteenth century had obvious implications for most of the world, though historians have managed often enough to deal only with its European side. The worldwide influence of the Third International between the two world wars, or the history of the Second World War itself are themes that become a kind of world history without their authors necessarily being aware of the fact.
Studies of earlier periods call for a more conscious effort to jump across the boundaries of culture-areas, but historians concerned with the interaction be tween the environment and human affairs find this a natural direction. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange is an example. He was concerned with the biological environment and what happened to it on either side of the Atlantic basin after Columbus’s voyage made it possible to exchange plants, animals, and diseases previously confined to either the Old World or the New.
This survey of the literature may seem to be a far cry from the problems of working historians, but it should illustrate the point that broad history is not necessarily superficial history. Though breadth may become superficial unless the historian has some orienting question or problem to point up the kind of data he needs-and for the kind of data he can do without. And this has implications for the kind of graduate education we might consider appropriate for the future,
What most graduate schools now do with PhD candidates puts a premium on specialization—not breadth—first of all through the highly specialized doc toral dissertation, followed by a narrow definition of “fields.” Narrowly defined “historical fields” tend to reinforce the narrow definition of “slots,” which history departments use to discuss their personnel needs. It is not unusual for a history department to advertise an opening in “Civil War and Reconstruction” and set out to employ the best person they can find with that particular and very narrow range of knowledge. With such narrow definitions of subspecialties, graduate students learn early and respond accordingly. The breadth that might help them to understand how the Civil War fits into broader human experience is not asked for, and it’s not likely to be supplied.
This is not to say that graduate students should not be trained to carry out specialized research. Ground-breaking research requires specialized techniques and detailed knowledge of a specific time and place. But students should be asked to develop span as well as depth. I see no reason why every finishing PhD in history should not be able to teach, with minimal additional preparation, an introductory course in the history of the United States and an introductory-level course in world history,
Let me be still more specific. I will assume the role of department chair at the University of Utopia. There, as in many other universities, students put in two years of study before starting to work on a dissertation. The work covered in those two years can be divided into four units—called “fields.” Each student is required to prepare a “field” from at least two of the major culture areas of the world—the West, East Asia, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and so on. In addition, each student must spend one quarter of his time studying some form of world history with some kind of orienting question. The world-history segment could be examined in a number of different ways. One of the most useful is to require course work, but to make the final ex amination a take-home in which the student writes about the context of his dissertation as it relates to other parts of the world. This is not so much to measure his knowledge of world history as to make certain that he thinks through some of the broader aspects of his projected research before he actually immerses himself in its depth.
If this kind of training were ever to become general, it would require basic changes in academic values, Breadth as well as depth would be rewarded. All historians, no matter how narrow their fields of specialization, would have to keep in the backs of their minds a concern for the way their particular research contributes to a broader knowledge of the way human societies change through time. That may sound like a large order, and it is. But my university is not “The University of Utopia” for nothing.
