Page 131 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

16 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

This map and the ones that follow show
from the white race by the broad stretch of the Sahara
evolving European knowledge of Africa.
Desert. Sometimes the blacks of inner Africa did wander
along [the Nile] into Egypt, but they only came in small
groups. Thus cut off by the desert barrier and living by
During the course of the early twentieth century, a
themselves, they remained uninfluenced by civilization by
somewhat different twist on the racial model of world his-
the north, nor did they contribute appreciably to this
tory became prominent, and this was the notion of civi-
civilization.
lizations. Historians of this era, such as H. G. Wells,
Arnold Toynbee, and James Breasted, built their analysis Thus the civilizational model did not so much displace
and presentation of world history around the presumed race as a means of defining world history as incorporate
racial and cultural continuity of certain civilizations. Not it into a larger framework. Race and civilization came to
surprisingly, these scholars placed European civilization mean much the same thing, and, as before, Africa and
at the pinnacle of a human hierarchy, with other civiliza- Africans played a role in world history only as the unciv-
tions, such as Chinese or Persian, playing at best sup- ilized foil to Europe’s achievement and sophistication.
porting roles. Like the Enlightenment historians before
them, these scholars left Africa out of the picture, owing Early Twentieth-Century
both to African’s presumed uncivilized nature and the Black Scholarship
absence of historical documentation. In the 1937 edition The twentieth century, however, witnessed a number of
of his The Conquest of Civilization Breasted dismissed challenges to the concepts of whiteness and civilization
Africa as separated from the “Great White Race” by the that had been constructed by earlier world historians.The
Sahara and therefore uninfluenced by civilization: first of these challenges came from a group of African-
American scholars that included such pioneers as Carter
On the south of the Northwest Quadrant lay the teeming
G.Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Both held PhDs from
black world of Africa, as it does today. It was separated
Harvard University and published extensively on black
history.Woodson, for example, helped found the Journal
of Negro History. Du Bois, one of the most prolific writ-