Western Civilization: A Social and Cultural History, Volume C: Since 1750 (2nd Edition)

On September 11, 2001--a day that the citizens of the United States of America will not easily forget--four planes, hijacked by four squads of suicidal terrorists, were piloted deliberately toward four monuments that symbolized the achievements and strivings of our society. Three hit their targets; one crashed before it could do so, probably because of the prompt and courageous intervention of some of the doomed passengers. Nearly 4,000 people died in the four incidents, including hundreds of citizens of foreign nations resident in this country. As these horrific events were pondered, while grief subsided and understanding dawned, the concept of "Western civilization" was mentioned rather more than it usually is in our bold and boisterous national discourse. Somehow, it was felt by many, these attacks had to be attacks on the fundamental structures of Western society: not just objections to American foreign policy, or resentment of American success, but a more basic blow to the values that sustain the democratic societies of the Western world. It is possible that some good will proceed from the great evil of September 11, and that one of the consequences of that day's events may be a renewed interest in the development of the West.- The second edition of this book therefore begins with some very basic questions: where, and what, is the West? WHERE IS THE WEST? When I teach the introductory history course at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, I start each semester by asking my students "Where is the West?" I send an unfortunate victim to the map of the world mounted on the back wall of the room. A finger roams around the continents of the globe. The class suggests many possibilities: western Europe? The western hemisphere? The wild west? The search goes on all semester--a search of special complexity for the many students who, speaking tens of languages, professing all the world's major religions, and hailing from all its inhabited continents, have no association by birth with Western civilization. To begin, I tell my students about Greenwich, England, where the Prime Meridian begins. Visitors gathered outside the gates of the old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, may read a sign announcing that they now stand "at the center of time and space." From that spot an imaginary line circles the earth from pole to pole, slicing the globe in half. The two halves are the Eastern and the Western hemispheres. The line is the Prime Meridian, the first and last of the infinite series of lines of longitude by which any location on the globe, East or West, can be accurately denoted by its precise variation in hours, minutes, and seconds from Greenwich time. The packs of schoolchildren who come to Greenwich are often photographed grinning as they stand astride the Prime Meridian--each with one foot in the East and one in the West. Yet both feet are in England, in Europe, and in the zone of Western Civilization. Part of England and most of Europe (and all of Australia and New Zealand) lie in the Eastern hemisphere. Yet they belong to the West. A good fraction of Africa lies in the Western hemisphere. Yet it does not belong to the West. The people of the nations of Latin America lie in the western hemisphere, accept an official language which is European, and adhere for the most part to the Roman Catholic Church--is their civilization "Western?" Or does a struggling economy, or a large population of peoples of mixed indigenous and African heritage, mark them as non-Western? What is the West? It isn't the "west" of the old movies, where for a brief moment cowboys prowled the frontier, and the native peoples of North America resisted the incursions of Europeans arriving from the East. It isn't the "west" of the Cold War era (1945-1991; see Chapter 30) when eastern and western zones of Europe adhered to different ideologies, and the boundary beMargaret L. King is the author of 'Western Civilization: A Social and Cultural History, Volume C: Since 1750 (2nd Edition)', published 2002 under ISBN 9780130450036 and ISBN 0130450030.