Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Narrative, Periodization, and the Study of History 
Theodore K. Rabb
Almost as soon as serious historical analysis began, its writers had to face the problem of beginnings and endings. It was all very well for the earliest Greek historians to assert that they were seeking truths about the past that would be more solidly based than the myths and legends of the poets. But it was quite another thing to figure out how their stories should be told. At least the Iliad or the Odyssey had appropriate starts and finishes. From the rage of Achilles to the fall of Troy was a straightforwardly unfolding ten years; and Odysseus’s twenty-year ordeal ran from the time he left Troy to his resumption of power in Ithaca. Without such a clear-cut narrative structure, what was the historian to do?

For the founding fathers of this mode of inquiry, the solution was to focus on, at most, a small set of clearly demarcated events. The essential question Herodotus asked was: how did the Greeks manage to win two well-known wars against the might of Persia? To find an answer he roamed widely across both geography and time, recounting the fascinating information he had heard about the many peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. But the only real narrative he offered was of the two wars, which by their very nature had both a clear start and a clear conclusion. The same was true of his younger contemporary, Thucydides, whose great work was an account of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. For Thucydides, however, it seemed essential to create a precise chronology if he was to explain what happened as the war unfolded. The result was an innovation of profound importance. Since the Greeks had no common calendar, Thucydides organized his account by counting years since the beginning of the war. Thus was born the notion of the distinct period of the past as constructed by the historian.

In the Roman world the basic way to identify a year was to name the consuls then in office—not a particularly effective way of tracing developments over time. The process improved somewhat when Caesar established the solar year, divided into months, but under the emperors, when reigns became the landmarks, even so astute a historian as Tacitus was unable to break free of the limitations imposed by individual lives as units of analysis. The next major effort to restructure human history came with Christianity, which divided the past into the periods before and after Jesus’ sacrifice. One idea, picked up by he most famous historian of the 8th century, the English monk Bede, was to count years since the birth of Christ. A fellow Englishman, Alcuin, followed suit, and made that way of reckoning the standard at the most influential cultural center of the next generation, the court of Charlemagne. From then on, the division of history between BC and AD swept through the West.

Not until the work of Petrarch in the 14th century, however, did the notion arise of distinct periods other than those before and after the life of Jesus. Petrarch’s remarkable innovation was the result of his disgust with the morality of his times and his admiration for the principles he found in the writings of antiquity. Those great ideals, he felt, had been debased in the “Middle Ages” between the fall of Rome and his own age. Much later, the centuries that followed were to be dubbed the Renaissance, a time of rebirth of the ancient world. For our purposes, though, what was especially noteworthy was that the idea of different periods, with different characteristics, even within the Christian millennium, took hold. The art of those “Middle Ages,” for instance, seemed barbaric for having rejected ancient aesthetics, and could be disdained as “Gothic.”

That attempt to define distinct ages is the heritage on which all subsequent historians have built. But how have we used our inheritance? When the modern study of the subject began, in the 19th century, the best way to structure the past seemed obvious. The natural organizing principle seemed to be the one bequeathed by the ancients: a focus on politics and war. It is true that Herodotus had discussed much else, but that was regarded as less serious, and in any case his central questions had been about war. Remarkably, not only did political change serve as the main armature for the historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but their favorite unit of analysis remained, as for Tacitus, a ruler’s reign. Thus the age of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV, or of Andrew Jackson provided the building blocks from which historical stories were constructed.

For generations of schoolchildren, the major eras and landmarks that they studied seemed immutable. For Western Civilization, it was Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, Absolutism and Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the 19th and 20th centuries. For America, it was colonial times, Revolution, early national period, Civil War, Progressivism, and the 20th century. And the landmarks on the way did not change: the likes of the Crusades, Magna Carta, Westphalia, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, World Wars for Europe; and Jamestown, Yorktown, 1812, Antietam, the Robber Barons, the New Deal for America. The framework, both for those doing research and for those sitting in the classroom, seemed predictable and secure.

But then came the advances in scholarship of the second half of the 20th century. New subjects like demographic history, the history of gender relations, the history of the book, or environmental history required their own chronologies. How was one to connect a fundamental demographic divide like the fertility transition to something as evanescent as politics? The leading pioneers of the new kind of social history, the Annales school in France, even coined a new term to describe their favorite timeline: la longue durée (roughly, “lengthy duration”). For them, politics was an epiphenomenon; the foundations of historical experience were the profound but glacially slow movements of daily life. Even those who challenged this view by emphasizing mentalités, the force of culture and ideas, agreed that change was often imperceptible.

The effect, over the past half-century, has been to fragment both scholarship and teaching. When the London Times Literary Supplement devoted half of its October 13, 2006 issue to a survey of developments during this very period, “New Ways in History: 40 Years On,” the one assumption shared by the highly diverse contributors was that the traditional interest in overarching themes or grand narratives was no longer viable. It is easy to make such a case. Someone who is pursuing research into apprenticeship in the metalworking trade in Brescia is not likely to have much in common with a colleague studying foreign policy in nearby Venice in the same period. The differences extend not only to the bibliographies that concern them, but also to the kinds of college or graduate courses they teach. As a result, the very topics that attract attention, let alone the ways of dividing the past into distinct periods, have lost the connectedness, the coherence, that they enjoyed in the mid-20th century. For some, the fragmentation is to be welcomed. It reflects the messiness of human existence; it forces us to recognize that some of the old, comfortable uniformities were fragile and arbitrary; it makes clear that there are important alternatives to politics as means of organizing people’s lives; and it encourages a seriousness and tough-mindedness that makes history more accurate and more believable. None of those conclusions can be disputed.

Yet there is a downside, too. First, it becomes very difficult to link the different arenas of research. Microhistorians, for example, are rarely concerned if larger political, economic, or intellectual movements seem unrelated to the patterns of life in the villages they study. Overarching narratives seem unattainable. Second, this disconnectedness can have serious effects on the other responsibility that historians share: to give a coherent account of their findings to a wider public, and especially to the young whom they teach.

The learning and writing of history is unmistakably an academic enterprise. As a profession, it requires its practitioners to observe rigorous standards and to adhere to accepted norms. Peer review and patterns of employment help ensure (as in a trade) that certain values and definitions of quality are maintained and reinforced. If, as a consequence of those features of our discipline, centrifugal forces have been at work in the past half-century, that is simply one outcome of the profession’s growing membership and increased specialization. But historians court indifference to their work if they allow these developments to undermine their second, wider responsibility to the larger society, and especially to their students.

For there is no escaping the recognition that, unlike most fields, the discipline of history has a public role that goes beyond its intellectual and academic commitments. From its very earliest days, its pioneers emphasized that it had a broad educational and even ethical purpose. Thucydides wrote to teach future generations the lessons he had learned; Livy thought tales of virtuous deeds would uplift his audience; Tacitus warned his readers about the effects of corruption and moral decline; and from the Middle Ages onward, stories of martyrs and piety were means of religious instruction. In more modern times, as nations coalesced, the purposes have become more specific. Arguments may be made for our promotion of intellectual skills, such as critical thinking, but above all history has become the mainstay of education for citizenship. Only through familiarity with the past, with the origins of present-day institutions and attitudes, so it is argued, can children come to understand the nature of the polity or the larger traditions into which they are born. Love of country, adherence to social norms, and informed participation in public life depend on an appreciation of the heritage one shares with fellow citizens.

Naturally, there can be enormous variety among individual accounts of past. To some, a nation’s history is a heroic epic; to others, a cautionary tale of ideals unfulfilled.  But until recently it at least had a recognizable structure, a basic outline that bestowed a shared experience on all who had to learn its details. And the same was true not only of the larger context in which a nation was formed, but also of the wider world to which it belonged. The aim, as those who justified the importance of history repeatedly stressed, was to raise a citizenry that had a shared sense of its heritage. For professionals, too, there was an advantage in having common ground with colleagues: an accepted broader picture into which one’s research could fit. Even new topics, such as economic history, could be absorbed without too much difficulty into the overall story that historians told.

Since the mid-20th century, however, that set of assumptions has evaporated. There can be little doubt that the fragmentation that has intensified during this period has been one of the reasons for the declining standards of instruction and the shrinking general knowledge of history in most Western countries. When there is no magisterial, let alone coherent, story to tell, history loses its force as an engine of civic education. No less important, however, have been the consequences for research and for the general standing of the historian.

The danger of the recent narrowing of specializations is a fragmentation of the profession as well as its subject matter. One symptom has been the proliferation of organizations devoted to small subfields. Another has been the flight from traditional periodization in research as well as teaching. At the micro level, a topic of investigation is considered to carry its own justification and to require connection neither to other areas of inquiry nor to any larger context, whether chronological or geographic. If the findings throw light on nothing but their own small world, so be it. At the macro level, the demands of a global perspective have led to a broad rejection of distinct periods or developments. Change proceeds at such different paces in different regions, so the argument runs, that uniform accounts become impossible. As a result, not only must the major divisions of Western history lose their role as an armature for global events, but even those divisions come into question. That it makes little sense to speak of global history until at least the 19th-century seems less important than the need to counter long-standing narratives.

The trouble with this approach is that it opens the door to a cherry-picking treatment of the past. If there is no “basic” story to tell, even within nations, let alone for the West, then any account is as good as any other. Common criteria dissolve; the center does not hold. If professional historians can agree on no landmarks, then those who use the past for their own purposes—politicians, ideologues, theorists—are free to choose their own. Those contemporaries who reject the special attention to politics that marked the pioneers of the discipline, and remained in place for nearly two and a half millennia, offer nothing in its place. The resultant impression of incoherence merely diminishes the influence of all historical work.

This is not to say that there needs to be a united front, a facade of lock-step orthodoxy. Historians have always disagreed with one another. But it is to argue that, without certain organizational criteria, both research and teaching alienate the audiences they deserve. And the central device whereby historians have gained those audiences has been through narrative. It is when they help shape a larger story that scholars’ detailed findings and their broad accounts resonate most strongly. The heart of any narrative, moreover, is periodization.

To make that claim is not to try to impose politics on those who deny that it is the bedrock on which all else rests. Rather, it is to suggest that there is a need for general structures that enjoy wide acceptance because they alone can restore a sense of connectedness and coherence to our understanding of the past. Atomization has to give way to recognizable form. And there is surely no more effective way to distill that form from the mass of available information than the one that has served the creators of our discipline so well from its earliest days: periodization.

The identification of periods that are distinct, both from what came before and from what comes afterward, is an enterprise that goes back at least to Thucydides. It implies that there is a basic uniformity to the experience of a particular geographic area over an extended period. The argument here is that unless such blocks of time are defined, widely embraced, and appropriately labeled, historians become incapable of addressing one another, let alone students or fellow citizens, in effective fashion. It may be that, for some regions of the world, historical research remains too incomplete to establish such an outline. But for Western and American history there can be little doubt that the major dividing points have long been in place. Attempts to classify these periods, or to argue over their features or boundaries, are often dismissed as fruitless exercises. But I would emphasize the contrary: they are essential to the health of the profession.

It is for that reason that I undertook, in a recent book, to take up this unfashionable topic and try to characterize the period known as the European Renaissance. If, en route, I sought briefly to define the major periods from the time of Charlemagne to the present, my main concern was to determine when the Renaissance came to an end—a subject that has drawn little attention but has major implications for accounts of European history. The basis for this analysis is the assumption that there is a profound coherence that binds together the behavior and the outlook of those who live in a particular geographic area over a sustained stretch of time. They share unities that are political, social, economic, and intellectual as well as political, and only a major shift in attitudes and activity signals that an age has come to an end. Just as the preferences of the inhabitants of a city reveal common inclinations in such different areas as sport and art, so a period in the development of an entire civilization displays certain unities that allow one to see it as distinct. Thus are born the building blocks out of which narratives are constructed.

More than one remedy will certainly be necessary before the fragmentation of history as a discipline is overcome and the resultant decline of its standing in both public discourse and the classroom is reversed. But renewed and serious attention to the issues raised by periodization is surely one of the ways forward. Without agreement about the fundamentals of the field, the impression of incoherence, both in research and in the classroom, will not be dispelled. To the extent that historians come to see that their larger message is no less important (and possibly more so) than their specific findings, they will be able to draw more effectively on the basic interest that their subject naturally attracts. Both on television and in the bookshop, its popularity is all too evident. To tap that enthusiasm, however, we need not only better teaching but also an acknowledgment that without recognizable patterns, we cannot give meaning to the past.

Theodore K. Rabb is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. Among his many books and articles are Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Harvard University Press, 1967) and Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton University Press, 1998).
 
 

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