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This past summer I went to Santiago, Chile with my family before the start of my semester abroad. My parents desired to leave the city because they felt Chile had more to offer than a large Western-feeling space. To my parents, cities could feel repetitive (having lived in New York for about 50 years). Parisians and Romans may disagree but I found this to be true of Dublin, Ireland as well. Upon arriving, my family immediately wanted to depart for the countryside because we felt like the city was not offering us anything we had not experienced before. “Bringing the City Back in: Space and Place in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” by James Connolly challenged my views of cities by bringing to light variations in spacial arrangements and “the specific history of social, economic, political, and cultural interaction that creates identities” (271). Many of these variations are associated with the Gilded Age and are distinctions that you might not pick up on if you are a tourist visiting a city for only three days.
These problems arise when people are quick to lump things together. Sherwood’s post questions, “Is the generalized overview more illuminating than the examination of a specific instance, or vice versa?” Rebecca Edwards in “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History” jokes about herself being a “lumper extraordinaire,” and although I admire her fight to rename history, I don’t agree with her oversimplification of history. History does not always fit neatly into years, in the same way spaces are created by cities. There is a benefit to classifying eras by the main components that make them unique, or their identities, which is reaffirmed in Sherwood’s post: “for the average students of history, there is little wisdom to be gained from the study of broad, general trends.” Place and space are typically geographical terms, but their concepts can be applied to history as well.