Periodization

Thinking about teaching

I’m going to end my World History 1 course and textbook in a few weeks. This week I’m writing Chapter 12 for next week’s class. I’ll be talking about a period roughly between 1100 and 1250, although often I tend to talk about the topics I pick in a slightly wider window, so I don’t leave the story hanging. This might mean, for example, that when I introduce the Hanseatic League (est. 1158), I might tell its story fully rather than cut the narrative off at 1250 and say, “I’ll have to tell you the rest next week”. Obviously for topics that are more or less permanent in the history (like the Chinese Empire), I return to them chapter after chapter. Maybe the Hanseatic League wasn’t a good example, because it really peaks in the 14th century. So I’ll probably split that across a couple of chapters and tell the story of its beginning this week.

The weekly chapter and lecture is a somewhat arbitrary format, but I think it makes sense to do more-or-less chronological little packages of information, while using the overlap of topics to try to reinforce the point that the “periodization” I’m doing in setting up these chapters is arbitrary. In a fully web-based presentation, it might be possible to build timelines that show how the different topics I cover extend beyond the chapters in which I cover them, and also how they overlap with each other. I do spend a bit of time in the text, when I jump from one region to another, saying things like, “at the same time this was happening in Europe, THAT was happening in China”.

It’s kind of interesting too, culturally, how there’s a different FEEL in different places. When I began talking about the medieval English and Norse world, it struck me that the place of Beowulf in that tradition has some parallels with the place of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, despite them being separated by three thousand years of time! Part of this involves the content and form of the stories, but part is also that they’re at the very edge of what we can see of those cultures. The world of Beowulf, though, happened after Greece and Rome, about which we have tons and tons of records and know a lot.

Funny that English-speaking people looked down on Native Americans because in most cases they didn’t have written languages when we met them, although this doesn’t seem to have stopped them from being smart and sophisticated, as the story of Kandiaronk tells us. But the English-speakers’ ancestors had only embraced “civilization” recently, relative to ancient cultures like the Mediterraneans, the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Indians, and the Chinese. Somehow, though, the Anglos managed to look down on all those folks, too. So maybe there wasn’t really that much reasoning going on there, after all.