What Is “Western Civilization”?

A Flight from Civilization

America’s Founding Fathers held the Middle Ages in contempt

L.D. Burnett
6 min readMar 7, 2021

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Photo by Hannah Wernecke on Unsplash

Tracing the history of the concept of “Western Civilization” encompasses three problems: understanding the history of the idea of “the West,” tracing the history of the meaning of “civilization,” and understanding how, why, and when those two…

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L.D. Burnett

Writer and historian from / in California’s Great Central Valley. Book, “Western Civilization: The History of an American Idea,” under contract w/ UNC Press.