Civilizations

All of the characters, battles, books, wars, and maps on the heritage history page are categorized as belonging to one or more civilizations. The idea of a civilization however, is hard to pin down with precision, and inevitably one must make some arbitrary decisions about categories in order to move forward. The purpose of our classification is strictly for convenience and in more than one case, results in the grouping of relatively independent cultures into a common civilization.

The reasoning behind these divisions was driven by expedience rather than philosophy. We simply desired to group the material we have available into manageable components, and this is what we came up with. The categories may very well change in the future, as more resources becomes available. The categories into which we have currently divided all of our world civilizations are as follows:

Of the civilizations listed above, only the Greek, Roman, British, and Hispanic have been completed. A Heritage History civilization is completed when a concerted effort has been made to collect and publish a broad collection of books related to that culture, and information associated with it, including timelines, character pages, maps, military history, and reading recommendations, have been organized in a systematic fashion by the proprietors of Heritage History. This process takes between six months and a year, depending on the available material. Once a civilization is complete, additional books can still be added to the reading lists, and revisions may still be made, but the framework is not likely to be altered significantly.

Many of the civilizations which are in progress have a great deal of material available for them both in terms of books, and also a considerable amount of supporting material (maps, character links, etc.) However, until a systematic effort has been made to supply all of the missing pieces, and a process of proof-reading and editing has been completed, the civilization will not be considered complete.

Part of the process of completing the timeline, character and war files associated with a civilization involves defining eras within each civilization. These eras allows books, characters, and events which pertain to specific time periods, regions, or ethnic groups to be studied together, in one comprehensible unit. They are intended to help students who are undertaking a systematic study of the whole history of a civilization by breaking the project up into smaller, less complicated pieces. Studying the whole history of Rome, for example, a civilization which lasted nearly a thousand years, expanded from a single city into a regional government with provinces on three continents, and underwent three major upheavals in government is a difficult task unless the problem is broken up into manageable components.

Timelines, lists of characters, reading material, and all other information associated with each civilization is therefore divided into eras, and can either be viewed independently, or together with all of the other material provided for that particular era.

The great majority of the history books we have available fall into the category of classical "Western Civilization". We are ourselves, however, extremely interested in non-western cultures, and have worked to collect as much material as could be found on other civilizations. We made putting introductory material related to non-western cultures a high priority, and some excellent books have already been done within all major civilization categories, with many more to come.

That said, it is important to remember, by way of explaining the disparity between western and non-western cultures, that international travel and communication was still very limited in 1923 (our cut-off date), and little was generally known about most Asian and African cultures until the late nineteenth century. Britain and other colonial-minded European communities took a great interest in non-western cultures, and sent scholars all over the globe to research foreign civilizations, and write their folklore and histories into English as soon as it was logistically possible. These early pioneers often faced difficulties and dangers that modern scholars cannot even imagine, and yet produced many excellent books, often written for the non-specialist.

Several of the authors we have published traveled extensively in foreign civilizations during the nineteenth century, (or even earlier) and wrote first hand accounts of their experiences. Some of these writers include

• Paul du Chaillu, the first westerner to explore the interior of equatorial Africa;
• Robert Van Bergen, an American who lived in Japan for several decades shortly after it was first opened to foreigners, and wrote a first hand account of the Choshiu-Satsuma Rebellion against the Tokugawa government;
• John Esquemeling, a pirate who actually participated in some of the most famous freebooter raids of the Spanish Main during the seventeenth century, and survived to write a famous book about them;
• Howard Hillegas, who traveled with the Boer army during the war in South Africa;
• Frederick A. Ober, an ornithologist who spent decades in the West Indies, and wrote a series of books about Spanish exploits in the region;
• Charles A. Eastman, (a.k.a. Ohiyesa), an American Indian who grew up among his native people on the Northern Plains, before being introduced to western civilization as a young man;
• Oliver Otis Howard, commander of Indian affairs under President Grant, and founder of Howard University,
• Demetra Vaka, a native Greek who grew up in Turkey and returned as a young woman to visit her childhood friends, who were mostly living in harems, and
• A. W. Kinglake, an Englishman who traveled throughout the middle east in the early 19th century under rather harrowing conditions.

The difficulties that several of these writers personally encountered in their adventures do a great deal to illustrate the enormous differences between western and foreign cultures as they actually existed at the time, and to dispel a great deal of modern misrepresentations. The point of course, is that it was not narrow-mindedness or disinterest that prevented many of our forefathers from learning about other world civilizations, but rather, tremendous barriers to travel and communication.

With today's, jet-setting "international community", McDonalds-ification of commerce, and smorgasbord approach to academic multiculturalism, it is easy to forget how utterly isolated and remote the farthest reaches of the world were for most of recorded history, and how stark the differences in human societies truly were.

Ironically, reading histories of these diverse non-western cultures as they were written in the 19th century by writers who observed them as they were at the time, gives a unique and valuable perspective that is not possible to duplicate by reading histories written by modern scholars.

The opportunity to study an indigenous culture before the full effects of modernity transformed it, is long past. There is no longer any indigenous culture anywhere in the world that has not been dramatically transformed, for good or evil, by modernity. Yet in the 19th century, the coming tsunami had not yet washed ashore on all continents, and there were still pockets of authentic indigenous culture in African villages, Chinese towns, Japanese hamlets, Arabian deserts, and Polynesian islands. It was the mission of most of these traveling authors to report what they actually saw and experienced in these foreign cultures, and many of their works are refreshingly frank, even-handed, and free from modern posturing.