"His comments also raised a lot of questions and concerns among historians who have pointed out that the idea of "Western Civilization" is itself a fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. For more perspective on this, I reached out to T.J. Tallie, an African historian at Washington & Lee University. As many historians have recognized, the concept of "Western Civilization" is itself rather new. It grew from debates of East versus West in late 19th century European intellectual circles, but did not gain traction in the U.S. until it was time to explain to soldiers going into World War I why they should fight for the survival of Europe...
After World War I and then World War II, there was growing interest in the narrative of our connection to western Europe. As University of North Carolina historian Lloyd Kramer said in an earlier interview on thisdevelopment, this narrative was part of the "modernization theory of history, popular in the late 1940s and ’50s, which described the world, as we came out of the horrors of World War I and World War II, as moving toward secular modernization.""
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