Telling classical from schmassical
Classical is another historical label that can have different meanings in different contexts. The classical period in European music, for example, was about 1750 to 1820, but people who study the Maya civilization of the Yucatan Peninsula refer to a classical historical period of about 250–900 AD.
One of the best-known uses of the term classical applies to the years 479–323 BC in the southern Balkan Peninsula of Eastern Europe. That period was a particularly influential era of Greek culture: Classical Greece (with a capital C).
Traditionally, many historians have hailed the Classical Greeks as being the founders of Western civilization’s core values: rationality, freedom of debate, individuality, and democracy. These concepts did arise and gain acceptance during that time, yet the Greece of the time was hardly an ideal society. Greek cities often fought wars against one another, and in addition to creating enduring ideas, they hatched some notions that sound quite peculiar today. In Aristotle’s time (the fourth century BC), for example, one could argue that women were “failed men,” a lesser rendering of the same biological pattern as males. Yikes!
The Greek city–state Athens is often cited as a model for modern democracies, but there are huge differences between the Greeks’ notion of democracy and today’s. In Athens, maybe 30 percent of the population at most were citizens, and all citizens were men.
Historians constantly reevaluate the past. As scholars reinterpret the period, the term Classical may no longer be helpful for understanding the years 479–323 BC in Greece. And you know what? That’s okay. You can look at the Greeks from any number of angles, and they don’t get any less fascinating.
Bowing to the queens
Scholars also name eras and periods for notable events or people, such as Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. In the Western Hemisphere, times before that event are frequently called pre-Columbian. A period label is often based on the reign of a monarch, such as England’s Elizabeth I (before there was a United Kingdom). Events, fashions, and literature from her reign (1558–1603, a golden age of English culture) carry the designation Elizabethan. A label may cover much longer periods, as when they derive from Chinese dynasties. The Ming Dynasty, for example, ruled from 1368–1644.
For a cinematic depiction of England’s Elizabethan era, you can check out 1998’s Elizabeth and its 2007 sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, both starring Cate Blanchett. The movies take liberties with the historical truth (as do all movies based on history), but they also give a vivid visual sense of England in the 16th century. A British “docudrama” miniseries from 2017 titled Elizabeth I makes an earnest effort to stay factual.
As with so many of the terms discussed in this chapter, the names of historical periods can lose their meaning with the passage of time. I was born and grew up in the postwar era, but as World War II fades into history and as more recent wars erupt, the term postwar is less widely understood. (“Which war are you talking about, Pops?”) Also, some labels can seem more arbitrary than others. Only 16th-century England under the reign of Elizabeth I wears the tag Elizabethan, for example. Elizabethan doesn’t describe the worlds of late-16th-century China (Ming) or late-16th-century Peru (ruled by the Spanish). Yet Victorian, a term for the period 1837–1901, when Victoria was queen and empress of Britain’s vast colonial holdings, applies well outside her sphere, especially to styles and cultural attitudes. Victoria never ruled California, for example, but San Francisco is recognized for its Victorian architecture.
Perceiving and avoiding biases
Some people challenge the very concept of history. “Whose history are we talking about?” they ask. If the victors write history, why do we accept those bullies’ tainted point of view as being true? What about the victims? What about the indigenous peoples, such as American Indians and Australian Aborigines? What about women? It’s not fair that so much of history is so overwhelmingly about white men.
It’s true that history as we know it is slanted. History is people writing about people, so prejudice is built in. You have to factor in the biases of the time in which events happened, the biases of the time when they were written down, and the prejudices of the scholars who turn them over and over again decades and often centuries later. I can’t change the fact that so many conquerors, monarchs, politicians, soldiers, explorers, and — yes — historians have been men. It’s just as true that conventionally taught world history still spends a disproportionate amount of time on Europe, on how it was shaped and how it shaped the other parts of the world: the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Are there other stories worth telling, other points of view, and other truths? You bet. You’ll find some of them in this book, lightly touched upon, just like everything else here. Where I can, I nod toward the realities of our global society as non-Western countries — most notably China, among many — have become major modern economic and political forces, and developing nations are poised to play ever-larger roles in shaping history.
I try not to repeat historical accounts that lie, saying that something didn’t happen when it did. Civilizations and nations have always done terrible things in the name of patriotism, nationalism, racial purity, religious righteousness, security, and most of all greed. Those things should be named and remembered. In 1096, for example, bands of Christians, as they gathered to travel east for the First Crusade (a war against Muslims at the behest of the Pope) waged brutal attacks on Jewish communities in Europe. Does it help anything today to pretend that those attacks never happened? No. Neither does it help to pretend that at least 500,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic minority weren’t brutally murdered, largely by militias under the Hutu-majority government in the African nation of Rwanda in 1994. It happened.
During World War I, the Ottoman Empire killed at least 1 million Armenian residents in what is today Turkey and deported many more. The Turkish government denied, and continues to deny today, that the wartime “relocation” of Armenians was an attempted genocide.
A few years after that atrocity, in 1921, a white mob in Tulsa, Oklahoma, attacked a prosperous black business district and destroyed it. The violence left hundreds hospitalized, an undetermined number of dead, and as many as 6,000 black people locked up by the National Guard. Tragically, the Tulsa Race Massacre and other attacks like it happened in many places in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet 100 years after Tulsa, some Americans vigorously argued that the event should be forgotten, that to recall it was too divisive, that this part of history shouldn’t be taught. U.S. President Joe Biden, when he visited the site in June 2021, disagreed, saying, “Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try.”
You may want to change the world. Good. It needs changing. Or you may just want to change the history books. Either way, it helps to know what you’re up against.
Noticing the Noteworthy and the Notorious
People are contradictory creatures. Many of the most famous people ever were as much bad as good. A great military leader, for example, can also be a cruel murderer. Furthermore, the way that a person is evaluated in history can change from book to book and historian to historian, depending on the point of view of the author and the subject matter being discussed. One book focusing