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01. Problems of Periodization
Overview
Periodization refers to the way that historians divide the past into distinct eras. Like storytelling, history writing requires a structure, and periodization is one of the main techniques used by historians to create structure. Yet the past is fluid, complex, and continuous, so any attempt to divide it into neat chronological chunks is bound to be artificial. Periodization always does violence to the complex reality of the past, and even the most careful and most honest attempts at dividing up the past involve some distortion. Any scheme must compromise between the often contradictory demands of clarity, coherence, accuracy, and honesty. The challenge of finding an appropriate scheme of periodization is particularly complex in world history, which tries to construct a coherent account of the history of all human societies.
Problems of Periodization in World History
The task of breaking the past into manageable, labeled, chunks of time raises several sorts of problems. We can classify them as theoretical, organizational, and ethical.
Theoretical Problems
Periodization poses theoretical problems because any chronological scheme highlights some aspects of the past and obscures others. While a historian of gender might look for eras in which the relative status and power of women and men changed (the granting of suffrage to women, perhaps, or the emergence of patriarchal social relations in early agrarian societies), a historian of war might be more interested in technological changes that transformed military conflict (such as the use of gunpowder or the appearance of the first organized armies), while a historian of religion might look to
2 the appearance of the so-called universal religions in the first millennium BCE. Different questions highlight different aspects of the past and generate different periodization. To choose a periodization is to make some critical judgments about what is and what is not most important in human history. By focusing on a particular region, era, or topic, historians can avoid some of these challenges, but in world history, periodization requires judgments as to the most important changes across all societies on earth. Is there sufficient consensus among historians as to what those changes are? At present, the answer is probably no.
Organizational Problems
Periodization also poses severe organizational challenges. How can we find labels that can do justice to many different regions and societies, each with its own distinctive historical trajectory? The problem is peculiarly acute in world history because while neighboring regions or states may evolve in closely related ways, societies separated by large distances may often seem to have little in common. The modern history profession emerged in Europe, and many well-established schemes of periodization were designed to make sense of European history. This is true, for example, of the traditional division into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Such labels make little sense outside of Europe, but they are so well established that they sometimes get used nevertheless. Similarly, Chinese historians have long used dynastic labels to provide a framework for historical writing, but these, too, are labels that mean little elsewhere. Is it possible to find labels that make sense for Africa as well as for the whole of Eurasia, the Americas, and the Pacific? On this question, too, there is currently no consensus among historians.
Ethical Problems
Periodization also poses ethical problems because it can so easily imply value judgments. School texts on European history have commonly used such labels as “Dark Ages,” “Middle Ages,” “Renaissance,” “Scientific Revolution,” and “Age of the
3 Democratic Revolution.” When used of entire historical periods, such labels were by no means neutral. They were generally used with the clear understanding that the Dark Ages were backward, that the Middle Ages were transitional, and that real progress towards modernity began with the Renaissance. Such schemes carry value judgments about different regions as well as different eras, because they implicitly compare the differing levels of “progress” of different regions. Until recently, it was commonly argued that, while Western societies had modernized, many other societies were stuck in earlier historical eras or stages and needed to catch up. Is it possible to construct a system of periodization that avoids imposing the values of one period or region on another? No system of periodization can satisfy all these different demands. Like historical writing in general, schemes of periodization reflect the biases and judgments of the era that produced them. They also reflect the questions being asked and the scale on which those questions are posed. This means that no single scheme will be appropriate for the many different scales on which historians can and do write about the past.
Schemes of Periodization
The simplest approach to periodization—one that is present in many creation stories—divides the past into two great eras. These can be thought of as the era of creation and the era of today (as in some Australian Aboriginal accounts), or the eras before and after “the fall” (as in the Genesis story in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition). Dualistic periodizations offer a powerful way of contrasting the present and the past, either to praise or condemn the contemporary era. Traces of such periodizations survive, even today, in dichotomous schemes such as those of modernization theory, with its stark contrasting of so-called modern and traditional societies.
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Three steps in the Evolution of Periodization Schemes Jesuit Priest and Scientist Teihard de Chardin Stage 1: Cosmogensis (5 billion years ago)
Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) Stage 1: Savagery (Fire, bow and arrow, pottery) Stage 2: Barbarism (Domestication of animals, smelting of iron, phonetic writing)
Stage 2: Biogenesis (4 billion years ago) Stage 3: Anthropogenesis (4.5 billion years ago)
Archaeologist V. Gordon Childe Stage 1: Paleolithic
Stage 2: Neolithic Stage 3: Civilization (Life in cities in which writing of any kind is used)
Stage 3: Civilization (Alphabetic writing)
Stage 4: Endomorphosis (40,000 years ago)
However, most schemes of periodization are more complex, dividing human history into several major eras, each with subdivisions of its own. Dynastic histories weave their accounts of the past using the reign dates of major kings and emperors as their frame. Such accounts are present in Chinese dynastic histories and in the chronologies of Maya historiography. Dynastic histories often imply a cyclical view of the past, in which each era (like each ruler) passes through periods of strength and weakness. Historical accounts conceived within a more linear view of the past often take as their main framework a series of distinct eras, all of which may be seen as part of a larger, universal trajectory. Writing in the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod described five great ages of history, beginning with a golden age, in which humans were contented and godlike, and passing through several stages of decline—the ages of silver, bronze, and heroes—and finally to the era of his own day, which Hesiod characterized as one of violence and stupidity. Patterns of rise and fall have reappeared in more recent writings, such as in the work of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) or Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975). Marxian historiography offered a combination of cyclical and linear chronologies, beginning with an era of simple perfection (the era of primitive communism), which was followed by stages
characterized
by
increasing
productivity
and
increasing
inequality
and
exploitation. But the Marxist scheme culminated in a future that would resolve these contradictions by combining high productivity with a return to the egalitarianism of the first era.
5 Most modern attempts at large, synoptic histories have preferred schemes that are fundamentally linear. Such schemes have been greatly influenced by the work of archaeologists and anthropologists, for whom the problem of constructing a periodization covering the whole of human history was often more urgent than it was for historians, who normally focused on shorter periods of time. Because archaeologists, unlike historians, deal mainly with material artifacts, it was natural for them to construct their periodizations around aspects of material culture. The nineteenth-century Danish archaeologists Christian Thomsen (1788–1865) and Jens Worsaae (1821–1885) constructed a scheme comprising three ages—a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age—that still has some influence within the study of prehistory. In the twentieth century, G. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) built on the Marxist insight that particular technologies imply distinctive life ways and social structures to argue that the major turning points in human prehistory were the appearance of agriculture (the “Neolithic Revolution”) and the appearance of cities and states (the “Urban Revolution”). Nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) and Edward Tylor (1832–1917) offered parallel schemes in which different eras were distinguished by different social structures in a progressive movement from “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilization.” In the late twentieth century, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists became increasingly sensitive to the dangers of using schemes that imply easy value judgments. So, while most modern schemes of periodization retain a sense of directionality in history, they usually resist the assumption that directionality implies either progress or decline. On the other hand, most modern schemes of periodization at the largest scales still rely primarily on a combination of technological and sociological factors to distinguish between different eras. This is a tradition with roots going back to the earliest written histories. The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, which dates from the third millennium BCE, recognizes, in the contrast between the urban warrior hero Gilgamesh and his great friend Enkidu, who came from the wild lands beyond the city, that different technologies imply
6 different ways of living, different systems of ethics, and different types of political and social action. Karl Marx (1818–1883) formalized this insight within the notion of a mode of production. The best justification for such an approach to the challenge of periodization is that fundamental technologies shape so many other aspects of human history, including living standards, demography, gender relations, political structures, and the pace and nature of historical change.
A Periodization for World History as a Whole
The scheme that follows is intended to provide a loose framework for discussing world history at the largest scales.
Major Eras The Foraging Era Societies mainly based on foraging lifeways
Three Major Eras of World History Approximate Dates Subordinate Eras (before present [BP] and BCE/CE) African origins 250,000-10,000 BP Global Migrations
8000 BCE-1750 CE (10,000-250 BP) The Agrarian Era
The Modern Era Societies mainly based on modern industrial technologies
1750-today
Agrarian communities before cities (later dates outside of Afro-Eurasia) Agrarian communities and the earliest cities and states (later dates outside of Afro-Eurasia) Agriculture, cities, and empires (later dates outside of Afro-Eurasia) Agricultural Societies on the eve of the modern revolution The Industrial Revolution Twentieth-century crisis The contemporary era
Approximate Dates (before present [BP] and BCE/CE) 250,000-100,000 BP 100,000-10,000 BP 8000-3000 BCE (10,000 -5,000 BP)
3000 BCE-500 BCE
500 BCE-1000 CE
1000-1750 1750-1914 1914-1945 1945-today
It offers a three-part periodization for human history as a whole, with subordinate periodizations within each of those major periods, which may vary from region to region.
7 This nested structure is, inevitably, an imperfect compromise between various different goals, but it reflects a broad consensus within contemporary writings on world history. Of the three major eras, the first is by far the longest, lasting for more than 95 percent of the time that humans have lived on Earth, while the modern era is the shortest, lasting just 250 years. On the other hand, populations were small in the foraging era, so that, measured by the number of human lives lived, the agrarian and modern eras loom larger. Perhaps 12 percent of the roughly 100 billion humans, who have ever lived, lived during the foraging era, while 68 percent lived in the agrarian era and 20 percent in the modern era. Increasing life expectancies in the modern era mean that, measured by human years lived, the modern era looms even larger, accounting for almost 30 percent of all human years lived, while the agrarian era may have accounted for just over 60 percent and the foraging era for just fewer than 10 percent. This periodization tackles the central theoretical challenge of world history by taking as its framework three fundamental technological changes. These are the emergence of the first distinctively human societies, all of which relied on foraging for survival, the emergence of agriculture and of societies that depended mainly on agricultural production, and the emergence of modern, industrial societies. This scheme handles the organizational aspects of all periodization systems moderately well in its first and third eras. Before 10,000 years ago, it is reasonable to argue that all human societies relied on technologies that can be described, loosely, as forms of foraging, so that some useful generalizations can be made about all human societies. But it is also true that foraging societies survived in many parts of the world until modern times, so if we are to define this first era more precisely, we might say that it is the era in which all human societies depended on foraging for their survival. In the modern era, too, it is relatively easy to offer a global scheme of periodization because all parts of the world became interconnected and all have been subject to some of the same forces and influences. So we can define the modern era as the era in which the profound technological changes of the last two or three centuries transformed societies throughout the world. The secondary periodization within this era reflects a loose (but by no means universal) consensus on some of the most important transitions within the modern era.
8 The organizational challenge is most intractable in the agrarian era, from about 10,000 BP to about 250 BP. In this, the era that provides the subject matter for most historical writing, the world was at its most diverse, and no single label can adequately capture that diversity. For most of this era, the histories of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, and the Pacific world played out in completely separate arenas. While in parts of Eurasia, agricultural societies emerged as early as 10,000 years ago, in Africa and the Americas, all societies relied on foraging for several thousand years more, and in Australia agricultural societies did not exist until the modern era. The best way of defining this era, therefore, is to describe it as the era in which agriculture first began to have a significant impact on human societies in some parts of the world. But the huge differences in timing mean it is vital to opt for flexible subordinate periodizations within this large era. The scheme we have adopted implies the recognition of four broad phases in the history of agrarian societies. These phases occurred at different times in different regions. In the first, there existed agricultural communities, but no true cities and states. In the second, there existed cities and early forms of states and empires. The third phase is distinguished by the emergence of larger and more interconnected systems of cities and states. The fourth phase is defined retrospectively by the understanding that, between 1000 and 1750, the world was on the verge of a transition more revolutionary than any that had occurred in any previous era of human history. The best way of solving the ethical problems posed by any scheme of periodization is simply to take great care with language and labeling. The labels used here are intended to imply no judgments as to the superiority or inferiority of different types of society or different eras of human history. On the other hand, this periodization clearly does imply a trajectory of some kind. On the largest scales, there can be little doubt that there is a directionality to human history. Foraging, agrarian, and modern societies have not appeared in a chronologically random jumble, but in a clear sequence. And that sequence has an underlying logic that reflects changing human relations with the environment. On large chronological scales, human technologies have changed so as to yield increasing amounts of energy, food, and other resources, which allowed human populations to increase. This, in turn, has given rise to larger and more complex
9 communities, whose technologies and sheer numbers have given them many advantages whenever they came into contact with smaller communities with less productive technologies. There is a shape to human history, and that is precisely why a periodization scheme of some kind is so necessary.
Further Reading
Bentley, J. H. (1996). Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization , in World History, American Historical Review, 101, 749–756.
Dunn, R. E. (Ed.). (2000). The new world history: A teacher’s companion. Boston & New York: Bedford. Green,W. A. (1992). Periodization in European and World history , in Journal of World History, 3(1), 13–53.
Livi-Bacci, M. (1992). A Concise History of World Population, Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Stearns, P. N. (1987). Periodization in World History Teaching: Identifying the Big Changes , The History Teacher, 20, 561–580.
Conceptions of Periodization
Periodization, the desire to make sense of human time by imposing epochs or eras upon the past, present, and future, has existed across time and cultures in global history. Categorizing human time into discrete periods makes sense of seemingly random past events and projects that coherence in a trajectory into the future. Many cultures have viewed human time in circular or cyclic terms, periods of history running their course eventually to restart the cycle again; some cultures, particularly the Euro-American West, have viewed human time in linear terms, periods of history running toward an ultimate goal. In some schemes, history is viewed as a narrative of declension, each age worse than the one preceding it; in others, a narrative of ascent toward progress and improvement.
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The Ancient World
In the third century BCE, the Chinese philosopher Tsou Yen (340–260? BC) developed a cyclic model of history modeled on the seasonal changes of the annual year. The Book of Rites proposed three seasons in human history—the Age of Disorder, the
Age of Righteousness, and the Age of Great Peace—which the Han commentators accepted in the Annals of Spring and Summer. This notion fell out of favor, only to be revived in modern times by K’ang Yu-wei (1858–1927 CE), for whom the cyclic theory of history was a central tenet of Confucianism. On the analogy of its theology of human reincarnation, Hinduism proposed a cycle of four stages (yugas), found in the texts of the epic Mahabarata and of the Puranas. The first age, the Krita Yuga, is the golden age of human virtue and well-being; the second, Treta Yuga, a period of declining virtue; the third, Dvapara Yuga, a time of disease and sin; the fourth, Kali Yuga, a time of human suffering and religious neglect (in which we are said to live today). The Kali Yuga will end in the destruction of the world and its reincarnation into a new Krita Yuga. The ancient Greeks tended to divide time into two: the mythic prehistory of the gods and the history of humans. In Works and Days, Hesiod (flourished c. 800 BCE) proposed a further narrative of declension and conceived of human time in five eras: the Golden Age, ruled by Kronos, in which humans and gods dwelt together without toil or pain; followed by the Silver Age, ruled by Zeus, during which humans began to neglect duties to the gods and to fellow humans; the third, the Bronze Age, a period of brutality; fourth, the Heroic Age, a time of great men and deeds; and finally the present Iron Age, a time of selfish individualism. The Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) adopted this scheme (minus the Heroic Age) in his epic poem Metamorphoses, giving it much wider circulation in Europe’s late classical and medieval periods. Ironically, the view of history as linear rather than cyclic and the notion of history as possessing a trajectory or goal that has come to dominate the modern world would emerge not from the great civilizations of China, India, Greece, or Rome, but from a Palestinian backwater of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Jewish people and their Christian and Islamic heirs. History, the Jewish prophets came to believe, was
11 teleological, that is, had a goal, toward which Yahweh directed them through the events of history; sacred kingship would be restored to Israel in the person of an anointed, a messiah. The final messianic age would be a time of earthly peace and wellbeing, a kind of return to the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve’s fall. In the interim, Hebrew Scriptures narrated implied stages: from Adam to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to the Babylonian exile. One of the Scriptures emerging after the exile, the apocalyptic book of Daniel (second century BCE), proposes an additional and more recent series of historical stages as well as stages yet to come. Through symbolic language and images (for example, Jewish history compressed into seventy weeks, or eastern imperial history configured as parts of a statue made successively of gold, silver, iron, and clay), the text imagines the sequential fall of empires hostile to the Jews and the rise of the messiah. Conceived in this Jewish matrix, early Christianity accepted the linear messianic view of history. For Christians, the messianic age had begun with God’s incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. At the same time, Christians awaited the return of Christ at a future time when the messianic reign of God, a millennium of peace and prosperity, would occur in full. The little-read prologue to the Gospel of Matthew, an invented “genealogy” of Jesus of Nazareth, neatly divides salvation history into three stages: fourteen generations from Abraham to King David, fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian exile, and fourteen generations from the exile to Jesus, the messiah. In the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul demarcated three stages of this history: from Adam to Moses, a time of sin without law; from Moses to the time of Jesus, the period of the law; from the time of Jesus of Nazareth, a final period of liberation from the law and from sin. Accordingly, the Christian calendar, which in the modern colonial and postcolonial eras has come to dominate global communication, begins with the birth of Jesus. If for Jews the turning points of history occurred in the covenant with Abraham and its renewal with Moses on Mount Sinai, and for Christians in the birth of Jesus (the first year in the common western calendar first developed by Dionysius Exiguus [c. 500– c. 560 CE] in the sixth century CE), for Moslems the turning point of history is the Hegira (migration) of Muhammad (c. 570–632 CE) from Medina to Mecca in 622 CE,
12 the first month of the first year in the Islamic calendar. Islam views Muhammad as the last and the greatest of the prophets among those of the People of the Book (the followers, successively, of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad); thus the third Islamic age is, in one sense, the last age.
Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Periods
Historiography in the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern period solidified the notion of history as possessing a goal with intermediary stages along its progress toward that goal and introduced a variety of schemes detailing the epochs of time. According to Collingwood (1946), western Christian concepts of historical time are necessarily universalist (that is, applying to all humans, not just to Christians), providentialist (directed by divine forces outside of human control), apocalyptic (having a goal that ends history), and periodized (advancing through discrete stages or epochs), features that even later western secular historiography would in some measure preserve. Christian historiographers, moreover, accepted the biblical accounts as historically true. In his theological reflection on history, The City of God, St. Augustine (354–430 CE) rejected classical cyclical views of human time and articulated the uniquely providentialist and apocalyptic Christian view of history, which he divided into seven stages according to the analogy of the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest or the six periods between the opening of the first sea land the seventh seal in the book of Revelation: the first stage from Adam to the great flood; the second, from the flood to Abraham; the third, from Abraham to David; the fourth, from David to the Babylonian captivity; the fifth, from the captivity to the birth of Christ; the sixth, the present age until the Second Coming of Christ; and the last, the age to come, when the saints will rest in the millennial kingdom of God. This scheme was also analogously based on the classical concept of ages of man from infancy to old age. These stages were later adopted by St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560– 636) in Etymologies and St. Bede (672 or 673–35) in The Reckoning of Time, works that, like Augustine’s, were widely circulated throughout the Middle Ages.
13 Perhaps because Christian theology is trinitarian (believing in three persons— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— in one God), tripartite historical schemes also appeared in the Middle Ages, particularly in the twelfth century. Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075–1129) postulated an age before the Mosaic law, an age under the law, and an age of grace; Hugh of St.Victor (1096–1141), the Age of Natural Law, the Age of Written Law, and the Age of Grace; and Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130 or 1135–1201 or 1202), the Age of the Father (the Old Testament period), the Age of the Son (the period of the New Testament and the establishment of the church in the centuries following), and the Age of the Spirit (which he believed to be emerging in his own time). The division of human time into “ancient” or “classical,” “medieval,” and “Renaissance,” which are used here, might be said to be the invention of the Italian humanists who invented the “Renaissance” in an increasingly secular, rather than theistic, view of history. Historians had long been preoccupied with the rise and fall of empires, none more significant than the Roman Empire, which many Christian thinkers after its decline viewed as nonetheless continuous, translated first to Byzantium in the east, and later translated to the Frankish and Germanic Holy Roman Empire in the north. Fifteenthand sixteenth-century Italian humanists, however, rejected this continuity, positing instead that they themselves were presiding over the rebirth of a phenomenon that had died with the ancient world, interrupted by an intermediary age of intellectual and artistic darkness. Thus they gave birth to another tripartite division of history: the Ancient Ages, the Dark Ages (a middle age or mediaevum ), and the Rebirth (or Renaissance) of the Ancient Ages.
The Modern World
Historiography from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment until our own time has tended to be scrupulously secular, rejecting theistic claims to a providential succession of stages leading toward a divinely ordained end. Yet modern schemes of human time have still preserved some of the qualities that Collingwood claimed for Christian historiography. They tend to be universalist, claiming to offer a master narrative of the
14 direction of all human history. Although not theistically providentialist, they tend to replace God with other external forces controlling human destiny. They are often apocalyptic or millennialist, positing an end to and an end of history. Finally, they are just as prone to periodization. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) proposed a cyclic view of civilization in three stages: the Age of Gods (primitive, superstitious prehistory), the Age of Heroes (with the emergence of writing and established political structures), and the Age of Men (with the establishment of commonwealths based on reason and law). His ideas were revived later in the nineteenth century by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874). Influenced by the utopian ideals of Condorcet and SaintSimon, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) developed a tripartite linear scheme of human history, which moved from the Theological (religious) Era through the Metaphysical (philosophical) Era to the Positive (scientific) Era. Perhaps the most influential modern schematizers of human time were Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), for whom the engine of historical change was economic and the trajectory of history was determined. In their view, human civilization emerged from an idyllic form of tribal communism into a succession of oppressive forms of the control of property and the means of production—the three successive stages of ancient slavery, medieval feudalism, and modern capitalism—which would eventually lead to the global revolution that would establish the workers’ paradise of communist socialism. With the economic engine exhausted, “history” would end. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites, postmodern western neoconservatives have appropriated this narrative, claiming an ironic victory for capitalism, the end of ideology, and, in Francis Fukuyama’s title from a popular post–Cold War book, The End of History (the full title is The End of History and the Last Man [1993]). Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, professional historians have been less inclined toward grand (or grandiose) universal theories of history with their schemes of discrete stages. The increasing professionalization of the discipline of historical studies since the nineteenth century has meant that professional historians increasingly specialize in a geographic area and historical period, defined more for academic purposes than for
15 theoretical ones. Thus students are familiar with (and their professors specialize in) such fields as colonial New England, pre-Columbian Aztec society, samurai Japan, Islamic Mali, or Victorian England.
Future Prospects
For centuries, chroniclers and historiographers tended to define historical periods from the perspective of political power (such as dynasties of ruling families or the reigns of monarchs). Among historians of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, the phenomenon of periodization has become problematic in two respects. First, it tends to make global judgments about local histories. What, for example, does it mean to characterize as “medieval” the period in Japanese history in which Murasaki Shikibu (978–1026) wrote the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji ? Even to describe sixteenth-century England as “Renaissance” England ignores the fact that the island never possessed a classical culture that could be reborn. Second, the very artificiality of periodization (if not arbitrariness) suggests that it is always an ideological formation at the service of an implicit theory of history. For example, many scholars today prefer the term “early modern” in lieu of “late medieval” or “Renaissance,” which suggests their repositioning the period as looking forward more than looking backward, but also a reflection of the self-consciousness of the “modern.” The rise of structuralist approaches to studying history (which examine structural institutions under specific material conditions) will likely further question periodization. Nonetheless, historians, teachers, academic departments, and popular culture will no doubt continue to employ and redefine local and global histories in terms of periods. Finally, the revival of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms (the former with an explicit dispensationalist or providentialist view of the stages of human time) will certainly revive some traditional schemes of historical development.
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Further Reading
Borst, A. (1993). The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Breisach, E. (1983). Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Esposito, J. L. (1984). The Transcendence of History: Essays on the Evolution of Historical Consciousness. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Fitzsimons, M.A., Pundt, A. G., & Nowell, C. E. (1954). The Development of Historiography. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole.
Gerhard,D. (1956). Periodization in European history . American Historical Review, 61(4), 900–913.
Gerhard,D. (1973–1974). Periodization in History . Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Vol. 3, pp. 476–81). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Economic
and
Social
History
Department,
University
of
Leicester.
(2003).
Historiography and the Writing of History: Sources and Methods: Module EH 2001.
Fukuyama, F. (1993). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon. Reinhard,W. (1997). The Idea of Early Modern History . In M. Bentley (Ed.), Companion to Historiography (pp. 281–92). London: Routledge.
Sullivan, J. E. (1970). Prophets of the West: An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Widgery, A. G. (1961). Interpretations of History: Confucius to Toynbee. London: George Allen & Unwin.
