**From one of our most acclaimed historians, a wise and provocative call
to re-examine the way we look at the past: not merely as the story of
incessant conflict between groups but also of human solidarity
throughout the ages.
**
Investigating the six most salient categories of human identity,
difference, and confrontation--religion, nation, class, gender, race,
and civilization--David Cannadine questions just how determinative each
of them has really been. For while each has motivated people
dramatically at particular moments, they have rarely been as pervasive,
as divisive, or as important as is suggested by such simplified
polarities as "us versus them," "black versus white," or "the clash of
civilizations." For most of recorded time, these identities have been
more fluid and these differences less unbridgeable than political
leaders, media commentators--and some historians--would have us believe.
Throughout history, in fact, fruitful conversations have continually
taken place across these allegedly impermeable boundaries of identity:
the world, as Cannadine shows, has never been simply and starkly divided
between any two adversarial solidarities but always an interplay of
overlapping constituencies.
Yet our public discourse is polarized more than ever around the same
simplistic divisions, and Manichean narrative has become the default
mode to explain everything that is happening in the world today. With
wide-ranging erudition, David Cannadine compellingly argues against the
pervasive and pernicious idea that conflict is the inevitable state of
human affairs. The Undivided Past is an urgently needed work of
history, one that is also about the present--and the future.
