Charlotte Shortback’s periodizing system was very influential. Of course, the idea of periodization itself is controversial and even suspect, as it seems often to be a matter of squinting hard and waving one’s hands in belletristic fashion to make sock puppet myths out of the dense “buzzing and blooming confusion” of the documented past. Nevertheless, there do seem to be differences in human life between, for instance, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment and the Postmodern; and whether these differences were caused by changes in modes of production, structures of feeling,
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