The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences

From one of our most acclaimed historians, an account of human solidarity throughout the ages, provocatively arguing against the received wisdom that history is best understood as a chronicle of groups in conflict.

Investigating the six most pervasive categories of human difference—religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization—Cannadine asks how determinative each of them has really been over the course of history. Without denying their power to motivate populations dramatically at particular moments, he reveals that in the long term none has proved remotely as divisive as the occasional absolutist cries of "us vs. them" (Christian vs. Muslim during the Crusades—and now; landed gentry versus peasantry during the Bolshevik Revolution; Jews vs. "Aryan race" in Nazi Germany, etc.) would suggest. For most of recorded time, these same "unbridgeable" differences were experienced as just one identity among others; and so whatever most chroniclers, self-serving mythmakers, and demagogues would have us believe, history needs to be reimagined to include the countless fruitful interactions across these lines, usually left out of the picture.