Basing your answer on the three assigned readings and the assigned film, describe the evolution of historical positivism during the first half of the twentieth century.

Judging by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), historical positivism—the view that history is a story of continual progress—was on the wane by the first decades of the twentieth century.

Or was it? John Scott’s Behind the Urals (1942) and the film “Burnt by the Sun” (1994, set in the mid-1930s) hint at the persistence of historical positivism, even amid the social and political upheaval of Stalinism.

Basing your answer on the three assigned readings and the assigned film, describe the evolution of historical positivism during the first half of the twentieth century.

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