Frank Harvey

“Even in the Maya case, to describe the entire period between AD 900 and 1520 as ‘Post-Classic’ is to suggest that the only really significant thing about it is the degree to which it can be seen as the waning of a Golden Age. In a similar way, terms like ‘Proto-palatial Crete’, ‘Predynastic Egypt’ or ‘Formative Peru’ convey a sense of impatience, as if Minoans, Egyptians or Andean peoples spent centuries doing little but laying the groundwork for such a Golden Age – and, it is implied, for strong, stable government – to come about.33 We’ve already seen how this played out in Uruk, where at least seven centuries of collective self-rule (also termed ‘Predynastic’ in earlier scholarship) comes to be written off as a mere prelude to the ‘real’ history of Mesopotamia – which is then presented as a history of conquerors, dynasts, lawgivers and kings.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Much of what e-history does is to flatten historical understanding into a competing war of symbols, deployed on a fast-moving Web in order to win arguments about the present.”
― Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past