Preface
Humanity lives with a chronic condition; we ask questions. It makes us fly kites in electrical storms, climb mountains, examine and philosophize onmysteries of the human condition, and even charge into battle against our fellow humans. Our curiosity often leads us into the unknown, dark areas of the absence of human knowledge. We blunder through time like a toddler, constantly testing our own boundaries, learning through trial and error, often burning ourselves on the hot stove of experience. But each time we are burned, our collective consciousness does not let us forget. As individuals we have all had these formative moments: occurrences that are constantly recalled from our memory, or maybe do not even have to be recalled at all, that guide us through our daily lives. The story of humanity is no different than our individual consciousness. Humanity’s story can be told by those moments in our deep and shallow history that have influenced our existence in an irrevocable and irreversible manner. These moments in our history are humanity’s historical turning points.
As a group of historically conscious writers, our class has been tasked with cataloging the broadest, most sweeping historical turning points of humanity. The encyclopedia exhibited on this website is the product of an entire semester of study, research and deep analysis, not only of the events chronicled, but of the formal modes by which modern humans view history. By studying and analyzing the modes through which humans view history we have developed a mosaic of different philosophies and views that we feel have enabled us to view history outside the bounds of the linear time scale ascribed by the historians who first professionalized the study of history in Europe during and after the Enlightenment. This preface is a detailed explanation of our group’s historical consciousness and its relation to the organization of humanity’s turning points.
Time is such a simple word. After all how complicated can four letters really be? Despites its simplicity in form, however, you would be hard-pressed to ask 10 American students at an American university what it means and get the same response from each individual. Ask those people what time means exclusively to them and one will get such a plethora of responses one will probably be left scratching his/her head wondering how the students all came out of the same general school system. That sample is just a group of people who are generally the same age, from the same country, and who have been through relatively the same school system. Now ask 10 people from 10 different countries.
Despite the irrefutable fact that time has a very fluid value and meaning, there are still a whole host of philosophers that encourage us to believe that time has exacting and directional patterns and motions. In fact, noted historicist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel asserted in the mid-17th century that humans are not even the agents of their own destiny.[1] He asserted that an overriding “Spirit”was leading humanity on a path not of its choosing. Similarly, Karl Marx, a student of Hegelian philosophy took things a step further. Marx rejected the notion of an over-arching spirit driving humanity down a certain path, but continued to support the Hegelian conclusion that time was moving inexorably towards a specified ending, the greatest freedom among humans.[2]
In contrast to Hegel and Marx, we subscribe to a different way of thinking supported by the concept of the “specious present.” We assert that since the specious present is “an unstable pattern of thought, incessantly changing in response to our immediate perceptions and the purposes.”[3] History, as a creation of humanity, must subscribe to this pattern of the inherent subjectivity of humans. We assert that since history is simply a record of human curiosity, and therefore follows no particular pattern except for the pattern of the randomness of circumstance. This belief has led us to create an encyclopedia of world historical turning points that is not organized in any overarching time order, despite the fact that modernity encourages us to viewtime and history in such a way.
European Imperialism forever changed the way the world views history. During the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, Europeans developed a strong sense of monochronic time and history. Workers, managers, owners and governments standardized time over vast areas. Similarly, historians from this time were busily building up histories to support what would become the most important governmental reorganization in human history, the creation of the nation state. As Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Smail explain in Deep History, “Under these conditions, the telling of time had to be marked culturally by embedding it in the past.”[4] By embedding this new sense of time in the past through creating strict chronologies, European scholars created a newfound sense of time.
Suddenly, whereas past histories were embedded in the stories and lessons of a previous time, the historians of Europe had created a historical model in which a progression of events led in a certain direction. Soon with the advent of imperialism, the Europeans would go on to spread this monochronic view of history around the world. This theory of monochronic hegemony, fit perfectly into the imperialist philosophies of European supremacy over the rest of the non-European world. European philosophers immediately started connecting this new, exclusively linear view of timeto show that Europeans were on the cutting edge of human progress.
Unlike the Enlightenment philosophers and historians, we view this model as somewhat flawed. To say with any authority that history is following one path(the right path) towards progress seems to need an omniscient knowledge. Furthermore, this model can only be used to explain a small sliver of written history, referred to as shallow history. We can be reasonably sure that humans are not omniscient and that there is more to human history than the last 6,000 years. Therefore, we can safely assume that there can be a more effective model for writing history.
If shallow history is the last 6,000 years of documented human history, then deep history is everything that happened since our ancestors stood up on two legs and started walking around the African plains, and possibly sooner. Understanding this deep history is immensely important to understanding the way humans, and the societies we created, work. The answers to our deep historical questions are the answers to the questions of what makes us human. However, the study of deep history requires using evidence that is outside the usual realm of historical studies. Its distinct lack of the use of written texts puts the study of deep history far apart from shallow history’s standards and the European progress model’s mode of study. Deep history acknowledges that biology is an important part of human and historical development.[5]
Deep History seeks to define historical patterns in the evolutionary terms of early human development. It effectively poses the question, “Are the last 6,000 years really so radically different that the last 5 million?” If events and evolutions from our deep history are constantly changing the way events occur in our shallow history, we must have a model that does not harness the study of history with recent human-created, artificial concepts of progress. We assert that if one subscribes to the theories produced by the study of deep history, which we support, then one has to view history in a different mode.
There is one more element in our more organic historical model; it is the active influence of memory. In deep history, the only history humans had was memory. It enabled us, better than any other species, to learn and build up skills and knowledge to be one of the most dominant species on the planet. In our deep history, specific dates and times mattered little to our ancestors; what was important were the stories and the lessons. Up until very recently, human history was told with a series of stories and fables that were not important for their specific content but for the morals at the endings.
Even with the advent of the nation state, we began to create a certain monumental history structured around people and events that were supposed to hold high places in our new collective memory. Unlike history, memory is more fluid and less precise, but all the history in the world cannot match the power of memory. Memory is how the past lives in the present. As humans and societies we rally around memory for the feeling of togetherness it evokes. We do not necessarily memorialize wars, elections, disasters and sporting events for their extreme historical importance but instead to enforce a sense of community and to remind ourselves of how we acted to get to a pinnacle of achievement. In fact, this is the point of monumental history: to make known collectively important events that enforce a standard collective memory among a people.
Today’s history classes focus on dates and progressions of events rather than on how those events affect us or what they can teach us today. This encyclopedia is based on Nietzsche’s ideas of using monumental history to teach the present and future. We are of the opinion that individuals should be historically aware of our shallow and deep histories in order to understand how humanity has gotten to its current position. Nietzsche states in“The Use and Abuse of History”: “For since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself (ourselves) from this chain entirely.”[6]
There is a large portion of the writing for this encyclopedia that is simply not documenting the facts of events that occurred many years ago. Instead we have written the encyclopedia in a way that provides a framework for explaining why the event we have included should be remembered. For example, it is not as important to remember that Napoleon marched across Europe as it is to remember how he changed the world by doing so. It is not as important to know when the first alphabet was invented, as it is to know that is revolutionized the way people communicate and trade throughout vast areas of the globe. The mapping of the Human Genome was a milestone in understanding how our biology works, but its mapping is not as important as the ways we have used that map to navigate the following decade of medical science.
We have written this encyclopedia not only to create a collection of events that we feel are valuable to our collective human consciousness but to also explain to our readers how these events still impact us today. In fact, we have based our selection process for the events in this encyclopedia according to their relationship to the way we live our lives in the present. Our hope is that by providing this resource to a curious population, we can influence a small group, who could then influence a larger group, to examine history in a more meaningful way. The old Enlightenment style of stale history embedded firmly in the past has led to a new generation of people who do not view the knowledge of history as a valuable asset. This encyclopedia is our humble attempt to show that history is alive and present in our everyday lives. The more we are able to collectively expand our specious present, the more information we can use in an attempt to continue humanity’s mission to further our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the processes that govern our lives. It is our hope that the reader will find as much value in our encyclopedia as we did in our process of creating it.
[1]“Hegel (1770-1831).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.d.
[2]“Marx (1818-1883).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.d.
[3]Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian.”The American Historical Review, 37.2. January 1932.p. 227
[4]Shyrock, Andrew. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. 2011.p. 26
[5]Shyrock, Andrew. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. 2011. p. 14
[6]Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.n.p. 1874. p. 13
Bibliography
Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian.”The American Historical Review, 37.2. The
University of Chicago Press.January 1932.
“Hegel (1770-1831).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.p. n.d.
“Marx (1818-1883).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.p. n.d.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.n.p. 1874.
Shyrock, Andrew and Smail, Daniel Lord.Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present.
University of California Press. 2011.
As a group of historically conscious writers, our class has been tasked with cataloging the broadest, most sweeping historical turning points of humanity. The encyclopedia exhibited on this website is the product of an entire semester of study, research and deep analysis, not only of the events chronicled, but of the formal modes by which modern humans view history. By studying and analyzing the modes through which humans view history we have developed a mosaic of different philosophies and views that we feel have enabled us to view history outside the bounds of the linear time scale ascribed by the historians who first professionalized the study of history in Europe during and after the Enlightenment. This preface is a detailed explanation of our group’s historical consciousness and its relation to the organization of humanity’s turning points.
Time is such a simple word. After all how complicated can four letters really be? Despites its simplicity in form, however, you would be hard-pressed to ask 10 American students at an American university what it means and get the same response from each individual. Ask those people what time means exclusively to them and one will get such a plethora of responses one will probably be left scratching his/her head wondering how the students all came out of the same general school system. That sample is just a group of people who are generally the same age, from the same country, and who have been through relatively the same school system. Now ask 10 people from 10 different countries.
Despite the irrefutable fact that time has a very fluid value and meaning, there are still a whole host of philosophers that encourage us to believe that time has exacting and directional patterns and motions. In fact, noted historicist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel asserted in the mid-17th century that humans are not even the agents of their own destiny.[1] He asserted that an overriding “Spirit”was leading humanity on a path not of its choosing. Similarly, Karl Marx, a student of Hegelian philosophy took things a step further. Marx rejected the notion of an over-arching spirit driving humanity down a certain path, but continued to support the Hegelian conclusion that time was moving inexorably towards a specified ending, the greatest freedom among humans.[2]
In contrast to Hegel and Marx, we subscribe to a different way of thinking supported by the concept of the “specious present.” We assert that since the specious present is “an unstable pattern of thought, incessantly changing in response to our immediate perceptions and the purposes.”[3] History, as a creation of humanity, must subscribe to this pattern of the inherent subjectivity of humans. We assert that since history is simply a record of human curiosity, and therefore follows no particular pattern except for the pattern of the randomness of circumstance. This belief has led us to create an encyclopedia of world historical turning points that is not organized in any overarching time order, despite the fact that modernity encourages us to viewtime and history in such a way.
European Imperialism forever changed the way the world views history. During the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, Europeans developed a strong sense of monochronic time and history. Workers, managers, owners and governments standardized time over vast areas. Similarly, historians from this time were busily building up histories to support what would become the most important governmental reorganization in human history, the creation of the nation state. As Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Smail explain in Deep History, “Under these conditions, the telling of time had to be marked culturally by embedding it in the past.”[4] By embedding this new sense of time in the past through creating strict chronologies, European scholars created a newfound sense of time.
Suddenly, whereas past histories were embedded in the stories and lessons of a previous time, the historians of Europe had created a historical model in which a progression of events led in a certain direction. Soon with the advent of imperialism, the Europeans would go on to spread this monochronic view of history around the world. This theory of monochronic hegemony, fit perfectly into the imperialist philosophies of European supremacy over the rest of the non-European world. European philosophers immediately started connecting this new, exclusively linear view of timeto show that Europeans were on the cutting edge of human progress.
Unlike the Enlightenment philosophers and historians, we view this model as somewhat flawed. To say with any authority that history is following one path(the right path) towards progress seems to need an omniscient knowledge. Furthermore, this model can only be used to explain a small sliver of written history, referred to as shallow history. We can be reasonably sure that humans are not omniscient and that there is more to human history than the last 6,000 years. Therefore, we can safely assume that there can be a more effective model for writing history.
If shallow history is the last 6,000 years of documented human history, then deep history is everything that happened since our ancestors stood up on two legs and started walking around the African plains, and possibly sooner. Understanding this deep history is immensely important to understanding the way humans, and the societies we created, work. The answers to our deep historical questions are the answers to the questions of what makes us human. However, the study of deep history requires using evidence that is outside the usual realm of historical studies. Its distinct lack of the use of written texts puts the study of deep history far apart from shallow history’s standards and the European progress model’s mode of study. Deep history acknowledges that biology is an important part of human and historical development.[5]
Deep History seeks to define historical patterns in the evolutionary terms of early human development. It effectively poses the question, “Are the last 6,000 years really so radically different that the last 5 million?” If events and evolutions from our deep history are constantly changing the way events occur in our shallow history, we must have a model that does not harness the study of history with recent human-created, artificial concepts of progress. We assert that if one subscribes to the theories produced by the study of deep history, which we support, then one has to view history in a different mode.
There is one more element in our more organic historical model; it is the active influence of memory. In deep history, the only history humans had was memory. It enabled us, better than any other species, to learn and build up skills and knowledge to be one of the most dominant species on the planet. In our deep history, specific dates and times mattered little to our ancestors; what was important were the stories and the lessons. Up until very recently, human history was told with a series of stories and fables that were not important for their specific content but for the morals at the endings.
Even with the advent of the nation state, we began to create a certain monumental history structured around people and events that were supposed to hold high places in our new collective memory. Unlike history, memory is more fluid and less precise, but all the history in the world cannot match the power of memory. Memory is how the past lives in the present. As humans and societies we rally around memory for the feeling of togetherness it evokes. We do not necessarily memorialize wars, elections, disasters and sporting events for their extreme historical importance but instead to enforce a sense of community and to remind ourselves of how we acted to get to a pinnacle of achievement. In fact, this is the point of monumental history: to make known collectively important events that enforce a standard collective memory among a people.
Today’s history classes focus on dates and progressions of events rather than on how those events affect us or what they can teach us today. This encyclopedia is based on Nietzsche’s ideas of using monumental history to teach the present and future. We are of the opinion that individuals should be historically aware of our shallow and deep histories in order to understand how humanity has gotten to its current position. Nietzsche states in“The Use and Abuse of History”: “For since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself (ourselves) from this chain entirely.”[6]
There is a large portion of the writing for this encyclopedia that is simply not documenting the facts of events that occurred many years ago. Instead we have written the encyclopedia in a way that provides a framework for explaining why the event we have included should be remembered. For example, it is not as important to remember that Napoleon marched across Europe as it is to remember how he changed the world by doing so. It is not as important to know when the first alphabet was invented, as it is to know that is revolutionized the way people communicate and trade throughout vast areas of the globe. The mapping of the Human Genome was a milestone in understanding how our biology works, but its mapping is not as important as the ways we have used that map to navigate the following decade of medical science.
We have written this encyclopedia not only to create a collection of events that we feel are valuable to our collective human consciousness but to also explain to our readers how these events still impact us today. In fact, we have based our selection process for the events in this encyclopedia according to their relationship to the way we live our lives in the present. Our hope is that by providing this resource to a curious population, we can influence a small group, who could then influence a larger group, to examine history in a more meaningful way. The old Enlightenment style of stale history embedded firmly in the past has led to a new generation of people who do not view the knowledge of history as a valuable asset. This encyclopedia is our humble attempt to show that history is alive and present in our everyday lives. The more we are able to collectively expand our specious present, the more information we can use in an attempt to continue humanity’s mission to further our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the processes that govern our lives. It is our hope that the reader will find as much value in our encyclopedia as we did in our process of creating it.
[1]“Hegel (1770-1831).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.d.
[2]“Marx (1818-1883).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.d.
[3]Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian.”The American Historical Review, 37.2. January 1932.p. 227
[4]Shyrock, Andrew. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. 2011.p. 26
[5]Shyrock, Andrew. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. 2011. p. 14
[6]Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.n.p. 1874. p. 13
Bibliography
Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian.”The American Historical Review, 37.2. The
University of Chicago Press.January 1932.
“Hegel (1770-1831).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.p. n.d.
“Marx (1818-1883).” The Interpretation of the Historical Process.n.p. n.d.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.n.p. 1874.
Shyrock, Andrew and Smail, Daniel Lord.Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present.
University of California Press. 2011.