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I am looking for studies of the impact of the change in conception of the chronology of human existence (from the Biblical to the archaeological) on historical writing. There is rich work on the impact of this change on anthropology (by Stocking for England and Trautmann for U.S.), but I have not been able to find anything comparable about the impact on history. Trautmann and Stocking argue that post-1850 scholars who perceived that humans had existed vastly longer than the Biblical 6,000 or so years filled in the new expanse of prehistory with ethnological cases. Non-western peoples were moved, in this evolutionary anthropology, from positions on co-eval branches of the human family tree that began with Adam and Eve to various stages along a single evolutionary ladder, a ladder that was both a timeline and a yardstick of human civilization. My preliminary research on history suggests that concomitantly the European past became something unique: it became the singular historical segment that followed pre-historic social evolution. "History" was thus separated, at one and the same time, from pre-history and from non-European Others. In this complex transformation, Europe attained a past that was its alone (and not a line that merged in the recent past with other branches of the human family tree); and vice-versa, Europe gained a privileged status as the singular collective character to undergo historical development--that is, to have "history." Certainly, such ideas had existed before 1850 in Europe, but they were brought together in a compelling way following the change in conception of the chronology of human existence. If anyone knows of existing research on this topic, I would greatly appreciate hearing about it. Daniel A. Segal dsegal@bernard.pitzer.edu
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