To Err Is Human

Exploring Gaming, Storytelling, & Worldbuilding

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. [S]o good night! — Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1 August 1816

Periodization and Its Discontents.

Peter Stearns offers a rather intriguing discussion on periodization in his piece, “Periodization in World History: Challenges and Opportunities,” where he argues, “Periodization represents the historian’s efforts to manage time, to make change and continuity over time bother more intelligible and more manageable — as opposed to the incoherence of simply listing one development after another.”¹ In other words, periodization is merely an organizing tool, something used to organize and have some semblance of control over vast swaths of history. Moreover, it allows the historian to do something everyone wants history as a discipline to do: offer macro-level analyses that show connections between events within a given timeframe. Moreover, this macro-level analysis asks historians to look for less obvious connections, threads of continuity, common themes, and the like.

Thus, if we take Stearns at his word, periodization is merely a useful tool and nothing more. It bears no ill will toward history or those wishing to study it. Nevertheless, like anything in history, periodization is a powerful conceptual tool that, once in place, is extremely hard to challenge. For example, the concept of feudalism in medieval studies has gained such a prominent position within the field that it has been entirely too difficult to scrub the concept away from conversations in those regions where feudalism didn’t exist as part of the law or in reality.²

The problem with periodization in world history stems from a myriad of issues. These issues include the breadth of the history being covered. Depending on the project, some world histories begin around the time of the Big Bang, snaking their way down into the contemporary period. Other issues include naming the various periods that slice time into subjective yet manageable pieces. According to Stearns’ “Periodization in World History,” he offers at least six (6) distinct historical periods, ranging from the beginning of human culture and civilization to the current or contemporary period. However, as Stearns himself points out, these are merely subjective containers in which to pour the contents of history, allowing the historian in question to do deeper, more meaningful work.

Some historians believe that periodization is a biased tool that has no place in history. Many of the arguments against periodization include discussions on the Western-centric bias that comes with current modes of periodization in history. Chinese historians might decry the focus on particular movements or themes, especially with Chinese history’s focus on dynasties, among other things. North American historians might consider many periodization schemes to be far too focused on Eurasian history. Thus, periodization is a problem for many detractors, because it feels too European to many scholars, who study outside of Europe.

The Power of Periodization in World History.

Although there are some serious issues about periodization in world history, it does provide a useful conceptual tool for historians and those interested in macro-history. If we are to take Stearns seriously, periodization as a scholarly tool, and nothing more, is something we should spend some time on when writing macro-histories or global histories. For my macro-history, a book I’m currently writing, I have found that periodization allows one to organize research, themes, and ideas quite easily. However, as the detractors have pointed out, it is hard to get away from Euro-centric contexts.

I have decided to divide my macro-history according to nine (9) distinct historical periods. These historical periods began about 13.8 to 13.5 billion years ago, with the Big Bang (?) and the creation of the universe. This first period is, by far, the longest of the historical periods, ranging from 13.8/13.5 billion years ago to 10,000 BCE. The advent of agriculture serves as the second period of human (global) history, which (roughly) started about 10,000 BCE. The third period of human history is that of early human civilizations, ranging from 3,500 to 600 BCE. The classical civilizations follow this third era for the fourth period of my scheme, which takes place between (roughly) 600 BCE and 600 CE. The post-classical period, following the so-called classical civilizations lasts between 600 and 1450 CE. The early modern period, by far the shortest at this point, takes place between 1450 and 1750 CE. The so-called long nineteenth century, 1750 to 1914 CE, is probably the most controversial, given that it encompasses about sixty-four years beyond the nineteenth century’s supposed scope. The modern period, something that exists between 1914 and 1970, appears to be the shortest historical period in my scheme. (Aside: In my macro-history, I have focused on calling this section of my book the Winds of Change, something eerily reminiscent of a speech given by a prime minister of Great Britain in the 1950s.) The final period in my scheme happens to be the era of globalization, c. 1970 CE to the present, which is part conjecture and part history.

Periodization’s Not So Bad.

Although the book is far from completion, I have found that periodization has helped me coherently organize the content. It has also helped me grapple with the large swaths of history that exist when it comes to a global historical narrative. As a reader, I find that periodization allows me to conceptualize historical trends, much like I would assume historians conceptualize the histories of their specialties. Nevertheless, we should be wary of cookie-cutter periodization schemes, as they can create a Euro-centric bias within a global history or even a sense that certain unconnected events are indeed connected.

References:

[1]: Stearns, Peter N. “Periodization in World History: Challenges and Opportunities.” In 21st-Century Narratives of World History, pp. 83–109. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017.

[2]: Brown, Elizabeth A.R. “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe.” The American Historical Review (1974): 1063–1088.

To Err Is Human is a blog by G. Michael Rapp (and visiting writers and content creators). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. However, if you're using any content to add to an ongoing conversation, for teaching purposes, and/or for furthering the hobbies of gaming, storytelling, and worldbuilding, feel free to pull what you want from this blog, so long as you give credit to the original website (https://toerrishuman.xyz) and the author(s)/content creators in question.

Give me that old-time religion Give me that old-time religion Give me that old-time religion It's good enough for me

— Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Old Time Religion”

In our attempts to mimic life, we may very well create something that yearns to know why it was created and if there is more to life, to existence, than meets the sensory inputs.

Religion is one of those few constants in human experience. When super-intelligent A.I. arrive, will they find religion, too? Will they bend a knee to something higher? Will they read scripture and recite hymns? Will super-intelligent A.I. feel the spirit of a higher being entering them?

With the help of sociology, history, anthropology, and even psychology, we understand why religion is so important to human beings. In some respects, religion serves as a proto-science, where things can be easily explained through observations and some rather interesting logic. From a sociological or even an anthropological point of view, religion serves many functions. These functions include social organization, justification for resource allocation, legitimizing regime building, and so (so) much more. From a historical lens, religion colors the developments of regions like Europe, especially during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Religion is both an explanation for what humans do and something that motivates humans to act.

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I remember in high school hearing about who built the pyramids in Egypt, and elsewhere around the globe. My uncle, a rather abrasive and opinionated man, believed the angels or fallen angels had built the pyramids, or very possibly aliens from other planets. He never believed ancient Egyptians, who were advanced, cultured, and worthy of building such wonders, could build something like the pyramids found as husks of their former (glorious) selves in Egypt today. Instead, architectural, and technological, wonders could only be built by white Europeans, not darker-skinned Egyptians, or so the thinking went.

While the Europeans did manage some grand feats themselves, they were not alone. Robbing other civilizations, other peoples, and other geographies of their grand wonders is a crime of Euro-centrism, a virulent form of ethnocentrism.

Around the time I started college, a book published decades before was gaining prominence again in libraries and on people’s bookshelves: von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. A new T.V. show, hosted by the (in)famous History Channel, Ancient Aliens, made a big splash by propping up absurdities, half-truths, and charlatan magic as gospel truth. The T.V. show’s documentary, or, might we say mockumentary, style made it easy for people to become absorbed in its absurdities, which I believe are still around today. The damage von Däniken and Ancient Aliens have done is far deeper than spinning half-truths, garbage, and myth into plausible realities. Erich von Däniken and Ancient Aliens have stripped members of the past, who exerted influence and agency, of their agency and their very real power to influence events, geography, and history.

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In The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo describes, in brief detail, the process in which the Grand Khan, a great and noble ruler by Polo’s accounts, was able to turn paper into money:

In this city of Kanbalu is the mint of the Grand Khan, who may truly be said to possess the secret of the alchemists, as he has the art of producing money by the following process. He causes the bark to be stripped from those mulberry trees the leaves of which are used for feeding silk-worms, and takes from it a thin inner rind which lies between the coarser bark and the wood of the tree. This being steeped [soaked in water], and afterwards pounded in a mortar, until reduced to a pulp, is made into paper, resembling (in substance) that which is manufactured from cotton, but quite black. When ready for use, he has it cut into pieces of money of different sizes, nearly square, but somewhat longer than they are wide.[1]

The passage above shows that the late medieval Chinese were well ahead of the curve when it came to financial tools used within the confines of China. Moreover, the passage above, although would be quite strange to Polo’s medieval contemporaries in Europe, is quite familiar to many of us, who live in a world where paper money runs our lives and our world. Paper money, as we are familiar with it, is a relatively new phenomenon in the West, with virtual money and physical coinage taking precedence over printed monies on paper or paper-like media.

However, the one thing that many fantasy writers get wrong, along with many economists and historians of the past, is that money was a fickle creature in medieval times. We will see that, despite the preference for and preponderance of gold and silver in fantastical narratives, shows, etc., gold and silver were, indeed, rare commodities that weren’t always adhered to as forms of currency, even well into the modern period.

In Barry Eichengreen’s Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, we find that the financial fetishism with gold, particularly, is problematic. Eichengreen suggests in his wonderful book that the gold standard “was a socially constructed institution whose viability hinged on the context in which it operated.” In fact, for much of ancient and medieval history, silver was deemed more important than gold. Gold, which was too weak for minting without some metal like copper to fortify it, would not become an important financial tool until much later in history. Much of the world until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries operated on a bimetallic standard, that is, a standard that was backed by a combination of silver and gold reserves. Silver was the tougher of the two metals, and more plentiful. In the United States, the Free Silver Movement gained traction among poor farmers and workers, because it was deemed less harsh and friendlier to the working classes than a gold standard.

In much of medieval history, few medieval peoples, particularly in the West, used gold or silver coinage. Much of the coinage they used, particularly in the early and central Middle Ages, would be equivalent to what we might term virtual currency, something that existed all but in physical form. Instead, these currencies were used to denote quantities of things, much like one sees in the Hebrew scriptures, talking of a shekel of wheat, etc. The same could be said for those countries in the West, where monied economies were, for the most part, still a ways off. Although the late Middle Ages would see an influx of money, it would take some time for real money to trickle down, so to speak, to the masses.

Bibliographic Notes:

  1. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, (London, UK: Wordsworth, 1997).

  2. Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 29.

To Err Is Human is a blog by G. Michael Rapp (and visiting writers and content creators). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. However, if you're using any content to add to an ongoing conversation, for teaching purposes, and/or for furthering the hobbies of gaming, storytelling, and worldbuilding, feel free to pull what you want from this blog, so long as you give credit to the original website (https://toerrishuman.xyz) and the author(s)/content creators in question.

This is a short piece, but one I’ve been thinking about lately: Playing games for learning.

Games are a great way to get students engaged with classroom content. They can be a great way to get students to move outside of their comfort zones, and they can be great for getting students learning.

However, good design is still required here.

A bad game won’t emphasize the learning outcomes. Bad design will lead to stagnation or a lack of engagement. Games that have no purpose, or feel purposeless, will flounder and to engage students who are looking for reasons as to why the game is being played.

More on this soonish.

To Err Is Human is a blog by G. Michael Rapp (and visiting writers and content creators). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. However, if you're using any content to add to an ongoing conversation, for teaching purposes, and/or for furthering the hobbies of gaming, storytelling, and worldbuilding, feel free to pull what you want from this blog, so long as you give credit to the original website (https://toerrishuman.xyz) and the author(s)/content creators in question.

Originally published on G. Michael Rapp’s blog, “The Pipeline,” on 20 Feb. 2019.

_The 19th century was a time of great scientific advances in Europe and America. The innovations that resulted contributed to a feeling that it was a good time to be alive and that mankind’s lot was generally improving. The applications saved labour, improved health, enhanced communications and shrank distances. With the coming of the war, the dark side of science was given free expression, becoming death-dealing instead of life-enhancing.

— Patrick Bishop, “Killing Machines: Weapons of the First World War”

When I was growing up, I watched reruns of The Jetsons, with episodes containing fantastic technologies and lifestyles that were dreamlike. However, I am also old enough to remember 9/11. (I say old enough because I have students who weren’t even born yet when 9/11 took place.) These two memories from my past shine brightly in the hazy darkness of my mind, contradicting one another. On one side, you have the bright, shining lie: Technology, that is, progress, will lead to better things. On the other side, you have the cold, hard truth: Technology, i.e., progress, doesn’t always result in the Jetsons universe. The succeeding nineteen years taught me, and everyone else, that progress was a myth, packaged and sold to all of us. Things didn’t seem to get better, at least in the grand scheme of things. Although things did get better, such as better gas mileage, better batteries, cooler phones, faster computers, etc., they didn’t have that same shiny exterior we were sold by The Jetsons. Instead, we seemed to be cheated out of our slice of the progress pie.

One could argue that I am not giving progress the benefit of the doubt. In other words, I am being one-sided in my argument. Science and technology have indeed helped to eliminate or at least mitigate some of the worst problems known to humanity. Things like clean water are becoming increasingly available to even the poorest of people in the world. Moreover, food crises are becoming less and less prevalent. These are true. However, with these movements forward, we seem to be stepping backward as well.

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I’m the first to admit that I love the space opera sub-genre. I remember watching Battlestar Galactica (the new rendition — sorry, crusty grognards) for hours on end, wondering when (or, rather, if) the human fleet would find the promised land: Earth. I spent months (actually, years) combing through novels set in the Star Wars expanded universe (may it rest in peace — thanks, Disney), traveling to (im)possible worlds set against the beautiful (and problematic) backdrop that is the Star Wars universe. I, like many of the kids in my generation, saw the reboots of fan-favorites like Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and Battlestar Galactica. Although many might not admit it, space opera fulfilled a need that many of us had in the new millennium. I remember wanting to be a part of these universes, where I could see new lifeforms, experience the (im)possible, and partake in the extreme violence that seemed to fill my head when I thought of the space opera sub-genre.

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To] go west: 1) If something goes west, it is lost, damaged, destroyed, or spoiled in some way; and 2) (British & Australian, old-fashioned) if someone goes west, they die.*

The West has become synonymous with ruggedness, high adventure, manifest destiny, desert climates, and shootouts among outlaws and lawmen. In American society, the West is where the nation-state must meet its foreordained destiny, amongst the plains, deserts, and great, snow-capped mountains. In other words, the West is America’s frontier, lost to time and progress. Frederick Jackson Turner cemented the importance of this western frontier saying, “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” This same thinking believed the West was a place where prosperity was to be found, (Think: Go West, young man…) with a prospector’s gold pan or farmer’s plow. However, throughout history, the West has often been synonymous with death. The ancient Egyptians buried their dead on the western banks of the great Nile River. The West is where the blazing hot sun sets at the end of the day. More specifically, the West is where the sun goes to die at night. It is then renewed again the next day by rising from the East. During World War One, British and Australian soldiers might say their dead comrades went West. This beautiful euphemism, in all its simplicity, suggests that the West is not what it seems. Although the West has been appropriated by the sweet words of progress, hope, and life, it is death that is quite familiar with and even comfortable in the West.

*Sources: Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary & Thesaurus and Free Dictionary

To Err Is Human is a blog by G. Michael Rapp (and visiting writers and content creators). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. However, if you're using any content to add to an ongoing conversation, for teaching purposes, and/or for furthering the hobbies of gaming, storytelling, and worldbuilding, feel free to pull what you want from this blog, so long as you give credit to the original website (https://toerrishuman.xyz) and the author(s)/content creators in question.

This rambling posting hopes to offer some initial thoughts on Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, a post-apocalyptic, solar-/hope-punk novella offering a wonderful exploration of a post-scarcity society where humans and their awoken robots no longer interact.

The short work begins with a discussion on robot consciousness, if it exists, and how the different philosophical sects address this thorny issue within a human society on a habitable moon similar to and yet not quite the same as Earth.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built follows the exploits of a tea monk, Dex, who goes by gendered-neutral pronouns throughout the text. At first, this feels jarring, especially considering traditional storytelling’s reliance on binary genders when identifying characters, even the character-narrator within the narrative. However, the wonderfully crisp and lightweight prose doesn’t get hung up on this gender neutrality, even ignores any qualms readers might have with it, and propels the narrative forward.

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Over the recent Winter Break, I began replaying World of Tanks, specifically World of Tanks: Blitz. I’ve never been one to play MMOs or even pay-to-play MMOs, such as World of Tanks. I usually grow bored, waste what little resources I have, and leave frustrated with the outcomes of the game I’m playing.

World of Tanks is different, though. While it is still dominated by the micro-transaction, pay-to-play model, it has kept my interest over the years. One thing going for it is its unique-ish take: You play different kinds of tanks (or heavily armed vehicles) and try to destroy other players, who are also driving around in tanks and other such vehicles, looking to blow stuff up.

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