About Time

I was 33 years old when I realized I was living in a different era from my past. My 1950s world of big skirts with felt poodles, petticoats, and even hoops; of sweltering at school in May and June because there was no air conditioning; of 45 rpm records; of going to the drugstore soda fountain and choosing vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream—all had been part of a different epoch.

Yes, I had been a young adult during the turbulent ‘60s (and was part of the turbulence), but I hadn’t experienced them as anything other than one year following the previous one, like day follows day, even if those days were tumultuous. It took twenty years for me to see my past as part of a distinct period, one that was gone.

Historians, however, routinely chop up time—they have to.

They don’t usually talk about decades, but, rather, periods like “medieval” or “early modern,” or kings’ reigns, or wars, or centuries. Regarding centuries: sometimes they use a term like “the long 18th century” (from the English Revolution of 1688 to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815). A student historian has to struggle to remember some of those centuries. We all know the 19^th century, but the 14^th century—oh yes, the l300s. Once we get that clear, we recognize it as the century of the start of the Hundred Years’ War (by the way, that war was 116 years long). I hope eventually to think of centuries by their events, not having to “translate” them first into years. That would be like thinking in a foreign language, something I am still trying to do with French.

Time isn’t just broken up into component sections, of course; it’s also continuous.

I discovered that as a freshman in college. I was taking World History, and just before school started, the instructor had fallen ill and the college had reached out to an emeritus professor. He was an elderly, white-haired, genial man. One day, as he was lecturing about the First World War, he looked up from his notes and said to us, with obvious feeling and remembrance: “You just can’t believe, in the years before the war, how much effort went into making Americans hate Germans.”

It was 1962, I was 17 years old, and suddenly, through that professor, I was linked to World War I in a way I had never experienced before. I was in his class, he was teaching, and he had been there. Fifty years—the time between that moment and the time he was describing—doesn’t seem like much now, but it did then.

Studying history is full of periods, epochs, centuries, but it is also a continuum. While I believe that people are essentially the same over the centuries, their circumstances (economists would say, especially their institutions) change. My study should help me understand which human experiences are accidental, and which reflect human nature;  which history is decadal and which reflects the long durée.