Cynthia Stokes Brown

North Carolina · connected1938–2017

American historian (born 1938)

Studied at Duke University

historian, pedagogue

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

The word "civilization" apparently first appeared in a French book in the mid-eighteenth century (L'Ami des hommes (1756) by Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, the father of the French revolutionary politician). Since then, it has had close associations with the West's sense of its own superiority. In order to see the past clearly, we must try to avoid this assumption built into the word.