The Undivided Past, David Cannadine
The Undivided Past, David Cannadine
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The Undivided Past
Humanity beyond Our Differences

Author: David Cannadine

Narrator: Gildart Jackson

Unabridged: 12 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/09/2013

Synopsis

From one of our most acclaimed historians comes 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 differencereligion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilizationCannadine 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 proven remotely as divisive as the occasional absolutist cries of us versus them would suggest, whether Christian versus Muslim during the Crusades (and now), landed gentry versus peasantry during the Bolshevik Revolution, or Jews versus Aryan race in Nazi Germany. For most of recorded time, these same unbridgeable differences were experienced as just one identity among others; 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, which are usually left out of the picture.

About David Cannadine

David Cannadine was born in Birmingham, England, in 1950 and educated at Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton. He is the editor and author of many acclaimed books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which won the Lionel Trilling Prize and the Governors' Award; Aspects of Aristocracy; G. M. Trevelyan; The Pleasures of the Past; History in Our Time; and Class in Britain. His most recent book is Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy. He has taught at Cambridge and Columbia Universities and has also served as director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is currently Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. 

Reviews

Goodreads review by Anastasia on March 17, 2013

It’s by pure chance that I came to David Cannadine’s recently published The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences in succession to Catalin Avaramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, though they harmonise quite well. Both are concerned with categories and perceptions, both with t......more

Goodreads review by Al on June 27, 2022

Despite some of the more virulent critiques of this book, I believe Cannadine’s work represents a point of view which is not only important, but crucially relevant to the way we understand ourselves (all of us) as we proceed along the potential trajectory/ies of the twenty-first century and beyond. S......more

Goodreads review by Nicky on September 27, 2016

I’m not sure if I’ve totally grasped the point of this book, because if I have, it seems very simplistic: basically, that none of the great dividers between people (religion, nationality, class, gender, etc) are actually as divisive as we think, and that they haven’t been historically either — that......more

Goodreads review by Tim on May 01, 2020

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. I may need to re-read, or at least revisit parts of it further anon. But initially, it strikes me as a book very much *of* its time, which I suspect isn't wholly apparent to most people reading it now. Perhaps this book will read very differently in......more

Goodreads review by Wayne on May 18, 2016

I DID find this book ...eventually. It is one of the many repeated covers shown when you go to look at other editions. There only seem to be these TWO other versions...it's a pale fawny cover with curvey lines down the sides. I DID NOT find this book at all interesting because I didn't believe in what......more

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