Why read Keeping Together in Time?

Book cover of Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History

Book description

Could something as simple and seemingly natural as falling into step have marked us for evolutionary success? In Keeping Together in Time one of the most widely read and respected historians in America pursues the possibility that coordinated rhythmic movement--and the shared feelings it evokes--has been a powerful force in…

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Topics

Dancing

Genres

History
War

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Why read it?

1 author picked Keeping Together in Time as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Author

I selected this book because it finally offered me some answers to questions I’d asked myself all my life: Why am I so driven to dance? Why does dancing make me feel so euphoric? McNeill found himself asking this last question when forced to go through endless military close-order drill (a sort of dance!) as a young draftee. Whence these surprisingly positive effects of “keeping together in time”? Over the course of his later life as a historian, he tracked down a fascinating array of anecdotal and cognitive answers. The relation of this phenomenon to unique details of how the…

From Elizabeth's list on European dance in female fertility and health.