What Space Is This Time? Historiography in the Space of History

Abstract

In asking the question embedded in the title, this article explores the tension between inertia and change in cultural historical studies. Inertia in this context does not mean inactive or inert (i.e., without active properties), but the structural constraints that are revealed when codes, forms, practices, roles, etc., contest. What kinds and forms of socio-cultural knowledge, values, or structures are maintained, developed, or abandoned across geographies and throughout a system’s history? Rather than thinking in terms of core and margin and related binaries of difference and “othering,” inertia and change as historiographical strategies focus on the dynamics that affect social systems and structures, preserving some systems to conserve energy while introducing or forsaking others. In the process of exploring these spaces in historiographical time, this article draws historical examples from attempts among scholars and performers in the United States in the latter nineteenth century to stage “American” histories that stored, rejected, and created past and contemporaneous historical spaces at such sites as Lewis Henry Morgan’s view of Ancient Society (1877), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.