The Backwards Survey

Here’s a second concept course, though the idea is neither new nor mine, and maybe it’s not really a concept course if several people have done it. Still, I would really like to try this someday.

The Backwards Survey

Every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events prior or contemporaneous … it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. And this Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man, is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length!
–Thomas Carlyle, “On History”

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Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.