Quotes About Periodization

To a historian that always is a difficulty. At what point in history does one particular portion of history begin

I didn't give myself enough breaks during the training year to recover. I didn't understand the power of periodization.

In the questioning of existing explanations the validity of periodizing Indian history as Hindu, Muslim and British was increasingly doubted. It had projected two thousand years of a golden age for the first, eight hundred years of despotic tyranny for the second, and a supposed modernization under the British.

Periodization based on religion as the sole criterion of historical activity is a negation of history.

Any system of periodization is thus inevitably social, since our ability to envision the historical watersheds separating one conventional "period" from another is basically a product of being socialized into specific traditions of carving the past.

Thus while claiming, on the one hand, a dubiously ahistorical, archetypical source for the superhero idea in the Jungian vastness of legend, we dissolve its true universality in a foaming bath of periodized explanations, and render the superhero and his costume a time-fixed idea that is always already going out of fashion.