The introduction to David Cannadine's "The Undivided Past" brandishes dueling epigraphs from Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world . . . " proclaims the quotation from Mr. Bush. "It was 'us versus them.' " Mr. Clinton's words, by contrast, decry the compulsion to "believe our differences are more important than our common humanity." Mr. Cannadine clearly shuns Dubya in favor of Bubba, yet the aim of the British-bred, Cambridge-educated Princeton professor isn't to praise the culture wars but to bury them. For him, "the unrelenting insistence on seeing the world in Manichean terms," through the stark and erroneous "categories of 'us' and 'them,' " warps our view of both contemporary politics and the grand sweep of human history. The message of Mr. Cannadine's deeply humane yet ultimately frustrating book is that "the real world is not binary—except insofar as it is divided into those who insist that it is and those who know that it is not." A Manichaean view of history blinds us to the "range, complexity, and diversity of our multifarious and manifold identities."
