The article explores periodization in historical analysis, defining it as the process of organizing the past into discrete, named time blocks for study. It argues that these frameworks are not neutral but are constructed through cultural and geographical biases, making periodization a narrative and political act. The article critiques the Eurocentric imposition of Western models, such as the Ancient-Medieval-Modern scheme, on global history, citing examples from India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It then introduces alternative global perspectives like the Chinese dynastic cycle, the concept of the Islamic Golden Age, and distinct periodization methods for the Pre-Columbian Americas. Finally, the article examines structural approaches like the Annales School and World-Systems Theory, and challenges the notion of clean “turning points,” ultimately concluding that history is an ongoing argument shaped by these interpretive frameworks.
The Unseen Frameworks of History
The concept of “the 1960s” evokes a powerful set of cultural images, from youth rebellion and counterculture to the sexual revolution. Yet, this seemingly straightforward chronological label is profoundly deceptive. The historian Arthur Marwick has argued that the cultural and economic conditions defining the period actually began in the late 1950s and extended into the early 1970s, a concept known as the “long 1960s”. More strikingly, one could plausibly claim that “The 1960s never occurred in Spain,” where Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime and conservative culture suppressed the very movements that defined the decade elsewhere. This simple example exposes the central challenge of historical analysis: the frameworks we use to organize the past are not neutral containers of time but powerful interpretive lenses that are culturally and geographically specific.
In historiography, this act of organizing is known as periodization. It is the process of categorizing the past into discrete, named blocks of time to facilitate study and analysis. Its primary purpose is to help historians manage the immense continuity of human experience, allowing them to identify patterns, understand historical processes, and analyze causation by framing events within specific, coherent contexts.
This article argues that periodization, while an indispensable tool for historical analysis, is fundamentally a narrative and political act. Its frameworks are not discovered but constructed, reflecting the cultural biases, geographical perspectives, and theoretical commitments of the historian. A truly global understanding of the past requires a critical deconstruction of dominant Western models and an engagement with the diverse ways cultures across the world have conceptualized and organized historical time, as evidenced in their own historiographical traditions and primary sources. This inquiry will proceed by first examining the theory and critique of historical periods, then undertaking a comparative analysis of global periodization schemes, and finally exploring alternative frameworks that re-imagine the very nature of historical time and change.
The Theory and Critique of Historical Periods
The Purpose and Mechanics of Periodization
Periodization is the essential scaffolding upon which historians build their narratives. Its practical necessity arises from the overwhelming vastness of the past; by segmenting time, historians can identify patterns of continuity and change and construct coherent accounts of development. Labels such as “the Gilded Age,” “the Interwar period,” or “the 17th century” serve as a convenient shorthand for complex sets of social, political, and cultural characteristics. This framework is crucial for causal analysis. For instance, by defining a transition from “feudalism to capitalism,” a historian can better analyze how broad economic shifts contributed to specific social changes and political conflicts. The period becomes a context that highlights the significance of events and their relationships.
However, the very utility of periodization is rooted in its fundamental flaw: its arbitrariness. History is a continuous and seamless flow of events; any attempt to impose sharp beginnings and endings on this continuum is an artificial act of the historian. The decision of what constitutes a pivotal, period-defining event: a battle, the death of a monarch, or a technological invention, is inherently subjective and a matter of constant debate. These disagreements are not trivial, as they directly affect how historical narratives are constructed, what is included or excluded, and ultimately, what lessons are drawn from the past. This arbitrariness is not a defect to be engineered out of the historical method but a core characteristic that must be acknowledged and analyzed.
This process is further complicated by what scholars have termed “explanation bias.” Writing with the benefit of hindsight, historians often underestimate the uncertainties of the past, implying a greater degree of causal certainty than the evidence warrants. Periodization can amplify this bias. By creating neat “before” and “after” scenarios around a turning point, it can make historical outcomes seem more logical and inevitable than they were to the people living through them. The framework, once established, begins to shape the “facts” it purports to organize. The very act of creating a period like “The Renaissance” reifies it, giving it an apparent reality and causal power it may not have possessed for contemporaries. The historian’s interpretive choice to emphasize a “rebirth” of classical learning pre-programs an analysis that seeks the causes of this break and the effects of this new “spirit.” In this way, the period itself is transformed from an analytical tool into a historical actor, a seemingly objective feature of the past that drives events. This reveals a deep epistemological loop in the practice of history, where our methods for understanding the past actively construct the past we seek to understand.
The Politics of Time: Eurocentrism and the Imposition of a Universal Past
The most influential and widely disseminated periodization scheme is the Western tripartite model of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern history. This framework has deep roots in Christian theology, echoing St. Paul’s division of history into three ages (before law, under law, under grace) and the medieval concept of the Six Ages of the World. It was secularized during the Renaissance, when thinkers like Petrarch looked back to the “Ancient” or Classical world and saw their own time as a “rebirth” after a “dark” intermediate period, the “Middle Ages”. This entire system is anchored by a quintessential “turning point”: the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, which traditionally marks the end of antiquity and the beginning of the medieval era.
This seemingly neutral chronological system is, in fact, the expression of a powerful worldview: Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is a perspective that views the world from a European or Western standpoint, with an implied belief in the preeminence of Western culture. In historiography, this manifests as the projection of European history as a universal paradigm. Other cultures are categorized as having passed through stages that Europe had already overcome, such as primitive hunter-gatherer, farming, and feudalism, with only Europe having reached the “modern” stage of liberal capitalism. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously articulated this view, describing world history as beginning in a “stationary” Asia before moving to its dynamic culmination in Europe.
Case Study 1: The Colonial Periodization of India
The imposition of a Eurocentric timeline is starkly illustrated in the colonial historiography of India. The British, seeking to understand and govern their new territory, produced histories that divided the Indian past along religious lines: a “Hindu Period,” a “Muslim Period,” and finally, the “British Period”. This framework is most famously associated with James Mill’s influential 1817 work, The History of British India. A nuanced reading shows that Mill himself, viewing Indian society as fundamentally static and changeless, did not believe it had “history” or distinct epochs in the European sense. However, his approach of reducing the Indian population to two large, undifferentiated religious communities, “Hindus” and “Mahomedans,” was adopted and simplified by subsequent colonial administrators. This religious periodization served to justify colonial rule as a modernizing force that brought order after centuries of supposed stagnation and conflict.
Paradoxically, this colonial framework was later embraced by some early Indian nationalists, who sought to reclaim a “glorious Hindu past” that was supposedly disrupted by “Islamic foreigners,” thereby laying the intellectual groundwork for modern communal politics. This periodization scheme fundamentally distorts Indian history. It ignores the immense regional diversity of the subcontinent, where historical trajectories in the south and northeast differed vastly from those of the Gangetic plain. Furthermore, it downplays or ignores non-religious drivers of historical change, such as the emergence of feudal social structures, and erases the history of itinerant peoples and forest-dwelling communities. As the historian Romila Thapar argues, this model has “frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of religion”.
Case Study 2: The “Historylessness” of Africa and Southeast Asia
The Eurocentric model was applied with even more devastating effect in other colonized regions. In Africa, colonial historiography focused almost exclusively on the exploits of European explorers and administrators. The rich oral traditions that preserved the histories of most African societies were dismissed as unreliable myth, leading to the pervasive and damaging assertion that Africa had no history apart from European contact. When confronted with evidence of sophisticated civilizations, such as Great Zimbabwe, colonial narratives often resorted to racist explanations like the “Hamitic hypothesis,” which attributed any significant African achievements to the influence of supposedly superior, non-African peoples.
A similar process of epistemological restructuring occurred in Southeast Asia. The history of the region was absorbed into a “master narrative” of European progress, with native societies cast as passive recipients of Western influence. The very act of naming and mapping the region, creating concepts like the “Malay Archipelago” or the “Netherlands East Indies,” was an exercise in colonial power that reshaped local identity and historical understanding. This process reveals a dual mechanism at the heart of Eurocentric periodization. First, it defines “history” itself according to European categories: written texts, linear time, and the development of the nation-state. Second, it measures all other societies against this narrow definition. When a society’s historical consciousness is preserved differently: orally, cyclically, genealogically, it is deemed not to have a history at all. The “lack” of history in Africa was not a discovery but a conclusion foregone by a biased definition of the subject. Decolonizing history, therefore, requires not just adding non-Western examples to an existing timeline, but fundamentally challenging the Western-centric definition of what constitutes “history” and “historical consciousness.”
Global Perspectives on Historical Time
Periodizing Chinese History
Long before the imposition of Western frameworks, Chinese civilization developed its own sophisticated and enduring system of periodization: the dynastic cycle. This model posits that each dynasty follows a predictable pattern: a new ruler, blessed with the Mandate of Heaven, founds a new dynasty and brings prosperity. Over time, the ruling court becomes morally corrupt, leading to decline, instability, and natural disasters. Having lost the Mandate, the dynasty is overthrown in a period of conflict, and a new, virtuous dynasty takes its place, beginning the cycle anew. This is more than a mere political timeline; it is a moral and philosophical framework for understanding legitimacy, change, and the cyclical nature of time, perfectly encapsulated in the famous proverb from Romance of the Three Kingdoms: “After a long split, a union will occur; after a long union, a split will occur”.
Primary Source Analysis: Sima Qian’s Shiji
This historiographical tradition was codified by Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC), the “father of Chinese historiography”. His monumental work, Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), provided the template for official dynastic histories for the next two millennia. The Shiji is a universal history covering over two thousand years, from the mythical Yellow Emperor to Sima Qian’s own time under the Han Emperor Wu. Its innovative structure, comprising annals of rulers, chronological tables, treatises on topics like economics and ritual, and biographies of notable individuals, allowed for a multi-faceted and complex portrayal of the past. However, the Shiji is not a neutral chronicle. Deeply influenced by his Confucian worldview and his personal suffering at the hands of Emperor Wu, he was castrated for defending a disgraced general. Sima Qian used the past to offer a sharp critique of the present. His work is an ideological construction that portrays history as a moral drama, demonstrating the consequences of virtuous and tyrannical rule, thereby establishing a powerful tradition of history as a form of moral-political commentary.
Critiques and Alternative Models
The dynastic model, for all its cultural power, has significant limitations. It is inherently elite-centric, focusing on the rise and fall of ruling families while often obscuring the deeper continuities and changes in economic structure, social life, and culture. In response, modern scholars have proposed alternative frameworks for periodizing Chinese history. Jacques Gernet focuses on evolving political structures, using labels like “palace civilization” to identify patterns that transcend dynastic change. Mark Elvin offers an economic perspective, identifying a long period of “permanent agriculture” that reveals the continuity of peasant life across several dynasties. Perhaps most provocatively, the Japanese historian Naitō Torajirō applied the Western Ancient-Medieval-Modern framework but argued that China’s “modern” era began with the “Tang-Song Transition” around 800–1000 CE, a period of major commercial and social change. This re-periodization directly challenges Eurocentric timelines by suggesting China entered a form of modernity centuries before Europe.
The existence of these competing models powerfully illustrates that periodization is an interpretive choice. The same historical timeline can be carved up in radically different ways, each revealing a different story.
| Model | Core Criterion | Key Transition Points | Analytical Focus |
| Traditional Dynastic | Ruling Family / Mandate of Heaven | Collapse of a dynasty, founding of a new one | Political legitimacy, moral virtue of rulers |
| Gernet (Political Structures) | Form of state organization | Rise of aristocratic cities, imperial bureaucracy | State formation, institutional continuity |
| Elvin (Economic) | Dominant economic system | Shift to permanent agriculture, market integration | Peasant life, economic structures, long-term trends |
| Naitō (Socio-Cultural) | Broad socio-cultural shifts | Tang-Song transition (c. 800-1000 CE) | Urbanization, rise of scholar-gentry, global context |
Table 1: A comparison of different models for periodizing Chinese history, demonstrating how the choice of analytical criteria produces different historical narratives.
The debate over Chinese periodization highlights a fundamental tension in the postcolonial project of writing non-Western history. The dynastic cycle is an endogenous framework, generated from within Chinese philosophy and historical experience. Naitō’s model, by contrast, is an exogenous framework; it adapts Western terminology to a Chinese context, albeit for the subversive purpose of challenging Western assumptions. This contrast reveals a core dilemma for historians of the non-Western world: Should they use indigenous categories, which risk being seen as parochial, or should they adapt Western categories, which risk perpetuating Eurocentric logic even while attempting to subvert it? The choice between calling the period after 1000 CE the “Song Dynasty” or “China’s early modern era” is not merely semantic; it is a political choice about how to situate Chinese history within a global narrative.
The Concept of the Islamic Golden Age
Another widely used, yet highly contested, period is the “Islamic Golden Age.” Traditionally, this era of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing is dated from the 8th to the 13th century, bookended by the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad (c. 750 CE) and the city’s devastating sack by the Mongols in 1258 CE. During this period, scholars in centers like Baghdad, Cordoba, and Cairo preserved and built upon Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge, making seminal contributions in fields like mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and philosophy.
However, this neat timeline is the subject of intense scholarly debate. Some historians extend the end date to around 1350 to include the Timurid Renaissance, or even as late as the 16th century to encompass the rise of the great Islamic gunpowder empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal). Others argue for a much shorter and more intense period of peak innovation, such as the two centuries between 750 and 950 CE. This disagreement reveals that the very definition of a “golden age” is subjective. The boundaries of the period shift depending on the metric chosen by the historian: is it defined by political unity under the Caliphate, the output of scientific discoveries, or military might and imperial expansion?
| Proposed Timeline | Key Justification | Start Event | End Event |
| Traditional (c. 750–1258) | Political / Dynastic | Rise of the Abbasid Caliphate | Mongol Sack of Baghdad |
| Short (c. 750–950) | Scientific / Intellectual | Translation Movement begins | Decline of original scholarship |
| Long (c. 8th–16th c.) | Military / Imperial | Abbasid rise, expansion of Islam | Rise of the Gunpowder Empires |
Table 2: An overview of the scholarly debate surrounding the periodization of the “Islamic Golden Age,” showing how different criteria lead to different chronological boundaries.
Primary Source Analysis: Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah
Within this very period of flourishing, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) produced one of history’s most profound works of historiography, the Muqaddimah (or Introduction) to his universal history. Writing in the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun developed what he called a “new science” of history, one that moved beyond mere chronicle to analyze the underlying social, economic, and environmental forces that shape human societies.
At the heart of his theory is the concept of ‘asabiyyah, or social cohesion. Ibn Khaldun argued that history moves in cycles driven by the rise and fall of this collective solidarity. Dynasties and civilizations are founded by groups, often hardy peoples from the peripheries, who possess a strong ‘asabiyyah. This unity allows them to conquer more decadent, sedentary societies. However, once in power, the new ruling group inevitably succumbs to the “natural luxury of royal authority”. As he writes, “the ruling group loses its grip on the reins of power” as its ‘asabiyyah decays. The dynasty becomes weak and begins to “crumble at its extremities,” eventually to be overthrown by a new group from the periphery with a stronger ‘asabiyyah, thus beginning the cycle anew. Ibn Khaldun’s work provides a powerful, non-Eurocentric analytical framework for understanding historical change. It is a systemic theory of social dynamics, grounded in empirical observation, that transcends simple dynastic or religious periodization and offers a universal model for the rise and fall of states.
Periodizing the Pre-Columbian Americas
The periodization of the pre-Columbian Americas presents a unique case, as it relies on two distinct methodologies dictated by the nature of the available evidence. For much of North America, where written records are absent, historians and archaeologists rely on a framework based on material culture and technology. This scheme divides the past into broad eras such as the Lithic stage (defined by early stone tools), the Archaic period (hunter-gatherers adapting to post-Ice Age climates), the Woodland period (marked by pottery and mound-building), and the Mississippian culture (characterized by large-scale agriculture and complex chiefdoms like Cahokia). This framework tells a story of long-term technological and social evolution.
In contrast, for Mesoamerica and the Andean regions, where complex societies left behind monumental architecture, intricate iconography, and forms of writing, a civilizational periodization is used. This model is based on the rise and fall of major cultures and shared artistic and political traits, dividing history into the Pre-Classic or Formative period (e.g., the Olmec), the Classic period (e.g., the Maya, Teotihuacán), and the Post-Classic period (e.g., the Toltecs, Aztecs). This framework tells a story of urbanism, statecraft, and intellectual achievement. However, even this model is not without its biases. The very term “Classic,” as applied to Mesoamerica from roughly 250 to 900 CE, has been critiqued as a case of the “Maya tail wagging the Mesoamerican dog”. The period is defined by the height of Maya monument-building and does not accurately reflect the timeline of other major civilizations, such as Teotihuacán, which reached its zenith and began its decline centuries earlier.
The rich primary sources from these regions demonstrate a profound historical consciousness, refuting any colonial notion of “peoples without history.” The historical-genealogical narratives meticulously painted in Mixtec codices trace royal lineages over centuries. In the Maya lowlands, dynastic histories: the births, accessions, battles, and deaths of kings, were carved in hieroglyphic script onto stone stelae and monuments at sites like Yaxchilan. These records show a clear and sophisticated concern with documenting the past to legitimize the present. The contrasting approaches to periodizing the Americas reveal a crucial point: the historical framework we can construct is fundamentally shaped by the nature of the surviving evidence. Where the archive consists primarily of stone tools and pottery shards, we write a history of technology and subsistence. Where it includes texts and royal iconography, we write a history of kings and empires. Our understanding of the past is always mediated by the fragmentary traces left behind, and the way we periodize is often more a reflection of this archive than of how people in the past actually experienced time.
Re-imagining Historical Time
Structural and Systemic Approaches to History
In the 20th century, a powerful critique of traditional, event-based history emerged from the French Annales School. These historians rejected histoire événementielle: the history of battles, treaties, and kings, as mere “surface froth”. The school’s leading figure, Fernand Braudel, proposed a tripartite model of historical time that prioritized deeper, slower-moving forces. At the surface level are événements, the short-term, fast-moving political events that occupy traditional narratives. Below this are conjunctures, the medium-term economic and social cycles that can span decades or even centuries. At the deepest level is the longue durée or “long term” – the almost motionless time of deep structures like geography, climate, biological constraints, and enduring mentalities. In his masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel famously devoted the first section to the enduring environment: the mountains, plains, and seas, arguing that this geographical structure exerted a more profound influence on history than the transient political struggles of any single monarch. The longue durée offers a way to periodize history based on deep structural continuity rather than political rupture.
A similarly macro-scale framework is found in Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory. This approach posits that since the “long 16th century” (c. 1450–1640), the primary unit of social analysis is not the nation-state but a single, integrated “world-system” defined by a capitalist mode of production. This system is characterized by a global division of labor that separates the world into three zones: a dominant core that monopolizes high-profit, technologically advanced production; an exploited periphery that provides raw materials and cheap labor; and a semi-periphery of intermediate states that exhibit features of both. From this perspective, modern history is not a series of national histories but the singular story of the expansion and deepening of this global capitalist system. Periodization is thus determined not by political events but by shifts in the structure of the world-economy, such as the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers (e.g., the Netherlands, Britain, the United States).
These structural and systemic approaches represent a profound shift in the understanding of historical causation. They move the primary driver of history away from the conscious agency of individuals (kings, revolutionaries, inventors) and toward vast, impersonal structures (geography, climate, the logic of capital accumulation). In doing so, they challenge the very foundation of event-based periodization. If the “turning points” we focus on are merely surface-level manifestations of deeper currents, then perhaps the most meaningful historical periods are not defined by political change but by climatic shifts, the stability of ecological systems, or transformations in the global division of labor. This fundamentally reorients the entire practice of historical analysis.
Deconstructing the “Turning Point”
The “turning point” or “watershed moment” is a central narrative device in periodization, marking a decisive break between one era and the next. While these moments are powerful organizational tools, they are often constructed with hindsight and can overstate the degree of rupture while obscuring crucial underlying continuities. A critical examination of several key turning points reveals a more complex picture of historical change.
- The “Fall” of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE): This event is the traditional marker for the end of antiquity. However, modern scholarship has largely reframed this “fall” not as a sudden, cataclysmic collapse but as a long, gradual transformation. The deposition of the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was a relatively minor event in a process that had been unfolding for centuries, driven by demographic decline, economic strain, and political instability. The survival of the Eastern Roman Empire for another thousand years, and the persistence of Roman law, language, and institutions (particularly through the Church) in the West, demonstrate profound continuity rather than a definitive break. The narrative of a “fall” is now seen by many as a flawed metaphor for a complex evolution.
- The Founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368): This event clearly marks a major political turning point: the restoration of native Han Chinese rule after nearly a century of Mongol (Yuan dynasty) occupation. It was a reassertion of Chinese cultural and political identity. Yet, a deeper analysis reveals significant institutional continuities. The Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, adopted and adapted Yuan practices, such as a hereditary service system for the military and an ideological, rather than regional, basis for the dynastic name. Furthermore, the highly centralized and absolutist style of Ming rule can be seen as the culmination of long-term trends in Chinese governance that predate the Mongol conquest. The Ming founding was thus both a rupture and a continuation, a restoration that also built upon the institutional legacy of the very dynasty it overthrew.
- The Meiji Restoration (1868): In Japan, the Meiji Restoration is the archetype of a modernizing revolution. It brought about the end of over 250 years of Tokugawa shogunate rule and the feudal system, launching Japan on a path of rapid industrialization and Westernization. The abolition of the samurai class, the creation of a national army, and the adoption of a constitution were radical breaks with the past. However, the event was framed as a “restoration” of the ancient power of the emperor. The Meiji leaders masterfully blended radical change with appeals to tradition, using the emperor and the state religion of Shinto as powerful symbols of national unity to drive the modernization project. This created a uniquely Japanese modernity, one that adopted Western technology and institutions while simultaneously reinforcing traditional values of loyalty and social harmony.
These cases reveal that “turning points” are rarely the clean breaks they appear to be. They are better understood as moments where long-term, underlying processes of change, the longue durée, become rapidly visible at the level of political events, the événements. The “fall” of Rome was the political culmination of centuries of internal decay. The Meiji Restoration was the political response to decades of internal socio-economic stress and growing external pressure from Western powers. Turning points, therefore, are not so much breaks with the past as they are moments where the cumulative weight of the past breaks through to the surface, forcing a rapid and visible reorganization of society. A sophisticated historical analysis must connect these different temporal layers, explaining how slow, structural changes create the conditions for rapid, event-based transformations.
History as an Argument, Not a Timeline
This global inquiry into periodization confirms that the division of the past into discrete eras is an essential but fundamentally interpretive act. The uncritical application of the dominant Western model, with its Ancient-Medieval-Modern structure, has systematically distorted the histories of non-Western societies, imposing a linear narrative of progress that often erases or devalues indigenous modes of historical consciousness. As the sophisticated frameworks developed in China and the Islamic world demonstrate, cultures across the globe have long possessed their own powerful methods for organizing and making sense of the past, from the cyclical moral drama of the Mandate of Heaven to the socio-biological cycles of ‘asabiyyah.
This analysis leads to a crucial conclusion: the goal of a truly global history should not be the search for a single, “correct” periodization to replace the Eurocentric model. Such a project would only substitute one master narrative for another. Instead, the true value of the concept lies in the deliberate use of multiple, competing frameworks. By viewing the same historical reality through different lenses: dynastic, economic, structural, and cultural, we can achieve a richer, more complex, and more globally-conscious understanding. We can see Chinese history as a story of political legitimacy, but also as one of enduring economic structures. We can see the “Islamic Golden Age” as a period of imperial power, but also as a more focused era of intense intellectual innovation.
Ultimately, history is not a static timeline to be uncovered, but a perpetual argument about how the past is structured and what it means for the present and future. As Confucius advised, “Study the past if you would define the future“. Periodization schemes are the primary tools and the primary battlegrounds of that essential intellectual endeavor. They are the architecture of time through which we attempt, as Niccolò Machiavelli suggested, to “foresee the future” by consulting “the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times”. The critical examination and comparison of these frameworks is therefore not a peripheral methodological concern, but the very heart of the historical enterprise.
Leave a Reply