World History - with Susan Wise Bauer

On a train between London and Cambridge in the summer of 2002, while traveling England for a month, I shared a seat with a young woman by the name of Miriam Levin. Upon my inquiry, she introduced herself as a recent graduate, from a Masters program, I believe, studying public archaeology. She had been hired, though I can't remember exactly in what capacity exactly, by the very people she had criticized in her thesis: the organization in charge of the maintenance and upkeep of the grounds at Stonehenge.

She asked me what I was doing. After explaining to her the nature of my trip, I went onto tell her I was studying History.

'What history, specifically?' was her next question.

This was not a question I was prepared to answer. I liked History, all of it. I liked reading about it, thinking about it, and so on. I said something to that effect.

'But you have to focus on something,' was her pointed criticism.

And the conversation, though amicable enough, went downhill from that point. Ms. Levin aroused such a turmoil within my naive breast, I was unable keep my thoughts straight, and was unlikely to have formed coherent sentences thereafter. It had nothing to do with her. Being a delightful conversation partner, she was merely the catalyst.

My youthful epiphany was that you couldn't make your way studying something called 'History'. There was simply too much of it.

Had I the chance to go back and have the conversation again, I would say something like: I want to study how world history is written, what sort of things world historians, or any historian for that matter who has a mind to study more than just a single interpretative dilemma within a limited spatial and temporal confines, brings to their study of the evidence. But, way back then, I didn't have the words the words to begin.

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Writing a world history is a task for only the least daunted of analysts, who also happens to be a a decent synthesist. The two skills are rarely found together in just the right proportions in a single person. Historians tend to gravitate towards different places and times based on personal interests. The more analytic minds attach themselves to the minutiae; the more synthetic minds tend to loose sight of the same. Personal interest bends the historian to one side or the other with respect to analysis or synthesis. What are they hoping to get out of a career reading, teaching, and perhaps writing books? What's the ultimate goal? Edward Gibbon was brilliant in his prejudices, and also in spite of them. It's no mistake he wrote on the fall of Rome and not the rise of Christian Europe. Whereas the task of a world historian demands a certain balanced presence of mind. One must take one's interest, or theme, and trace it through a vast amount of secondary literature, covering the extent, at least, of the human race's 'written memory'. Analysis and synthesis must be held in a near perfect balance, as one pours through and collects information.

I know will never do this, as any attempt on my part would be fool-hardy. My mind lends itself much too strongly towards synthesis.

But I have met a mind near-perfectly balanced in the work of Susan Wise Bauer. No need to roll your eyes. The accolades are deserved, even though their timing might be a little off. Usually you wait for a few decades to pass after the date of expiration before waxing eloquent about a person's intellectual achievements. The dust has to settle on the old controversies before old friends and foes can agree, at the absolute bare minimum, upon the significance of a person's intellectual contributions for posterity. Here, however, I allow myself to be burdened by no such compunctions.

Bauer is the author of number of books written with the concerns of a classical humanist education in mind. My interest is in her The History of the Ancient World (2007), The History of the Medieval World (2010), and her forthcoming The History of the Renaissance World (2013). A fourth volume, rounding off the series in the modern age, is planned; projecting forward from the previous publication dates, perhaps for 2016.

Over the next week or so, I will be posting my responses to the first volume in Bauer's world historical tetralogy. The tendency towards specialization among trained historians will mean that scholarly criticisms leveled against her work will either be directed at the sorts of things she left out and the sorts of things she decided to leave in or at the ideological cast of her narrative. Critics either see individual trees or they see the forest. My interest in her book lies somewhere between the two extremes; in the mental processes a person makes moving from a focus on a single tree or group of trees to surveying the forest as a whole.

I want to watch her reading, selecting, reorganizing, and writing the volume; I am curious to see if I can trace out concerns that she has in the way the volume is organized, how the narratives are written, and the sorts of things she gravitates towards.