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A HISTORY OF WORLD HISTORY

World History is the telling of the entire history of the earth and of all mankind in a single and coherent presentation. As an idea, it began with the Old Testament of the Bible, which recounts the world's history until the time of Moses, and with Herodotus in Greece, the Father of History, who traveled all around the Greco-Persian sphere, and wrote from his travels the first 'history of all nations' as he knew them. Herodotus was extremely bothered by the idea that when a person died, all that he knew died as well- and so he wrote his life's knowledge down. But during those times, not all of the world, in its great extent, was known to the writers. In Han China, a 'World History' was written as well, when the existence of kingdoms in India and Central Asia was confirmed. The idea is, "who are these people that live in the world, and what is their story?"

In its modern form, the systematic study of World History began in the 1720s, when a group of Englishmen decided to undertake a publication that can only be called amazing, based on what they took to be the British public's newfound interest in far-flung places around the world. Recently for them, the Age of Exploration had opened the world to the European mind, and so they called this set the "Universal History." At 64 volumes, it is still the largest history set ever published, and took over 50 years to finish. One by one the volumes arrived to the subscriber's house like a newspaper or monthly magazine. Suffice to say, only a couple complete sets still exist, and probably no one currently alive has actually red the whole thing (but that may change- Google is digitizing it!).

250 years ago, this enormous set satisfied a need to know. Its sheer bulk made it hard to pass around, of course, but the idea caught on. Soon, smaller and more readable 'universal histories' appeared. After the French and American Revolutions, in the early 1800s, nationalism and romantic ideas stuck a cord, leading to further interest about who the peoples of the world are and what they are like. A 6-volume Dutch work was translated into English, called the "Universal Geography", and was published in 1812, while Napoleon was campaigning throughout Europe. Urania, the muse of astronomy/geography, and Clio the muse of history, have always been best friends. In fact, isn't history just geography in 4-D?

Later in the 1880s, increased European imperial control over the rest of the world made necessary more popular editions of a true world-historical outlook. S.E. Goodrich adopted a pen-name, Peter Parley, and wrote for kids, while master-historian James Clark Ridpath published his "Cyclopedia of Universal History." This 3 volume set was meant for the "intelligent American," and was very popular. There must have been many smart Americans at the time, because it can be tough reading! As can be seen below, 19th Century bookbinders took great care to decorate their covers. In our time, pictures feature, but something seems lost in comparison to the old-fashioned artwork. Another geography, meanwhile, appeared in the 1885, "The World, its Cities and Peoples," in which the reader was taken on a trip around the world to meet the peoples of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, Central Asia, China and Japan, and Latin America. Ridpath did not let that geography go unanswered, however, and by the mid-1890s published a work called , "Great Races of Mankind", which took a similar trip to find the cultural history of the world's peoples. Interestingly, this being the 1800s, while these books do reflect their authors' Eurocentric bias, in reading them one finds a large degree of compassion and understanding, and most importantly, a desire to see people be left alone to live how they will, much like the "Prime Directive" in Star Trek, where the advanced civilization is under strict orders not to interefere with aliens in the 'earlier stages' of social development. It seems the more one studies history, even in an age when European superiority was taken for granted, one finds cause for kindness and peace. These books demystified peoples, tribes and other civilizations like the Chinese or Indian, and found within them all a common humanity.

Britain and America were not the only places that great world histories were being done. In 1905, the great effort of the kind in Germany, a large 24 volume work called "Allemagne Weltgeschichte" (or, "General World History of all Nations") was translated to English. It followed the stream of Western Civilization but brought other civilizations' histories to the readers attention vis-a-vis, or in conjunction with, the Western. Thirteen years later, when World War I sparked peoples interest in the history of the small nations involved, the Grolier Society compiled a beautiful work in 18 Volumes on called simply the "Book of History." It featured something different: instead of one or a few authors putting together a massive work, in this set a great many experts wrote only about topics dealing with their specific expertise. This work had an amazing 8000 pictures, and began, like many of these, with mankind's place in the cosmic scheme. The first chapter is entitled, "Man and the Universe". Before comparing one's own national history to others, then, it is good to recall we are all together on Spaceship Earth.

In 1925 traveler-historian Ira Hiller made a trip around the world, and issued a series of pamphlets covering the places he (or his collegues) had been. Called, "The World and its People," the 85 magazine-style issues reflected the new post-war changes: the Austrian and Turkish empires had been broken up into many new nations, those in Europe being self-determining, and those in the Near East being governed mostly by British mandate. In the new "Irak", along the River Euphrates, happy-go-lucky Arabs point out to Hiller the exact tree Eve took the apple from!

In the 1920s, a real star prepared a world history that was to become the best selling world history of all time: science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds) set out to write for the British and American public a new and fresh "Outline of History". Like the others, he covered all the world (although some chapters are rather encompassing, like "Seven Centuries in Asia"), the difference was he was a gifted Sci-fi writer, and his style was well liked. At the end he speculates, much like in his science fiction, what will become of humanity in the next hundred years based on the journey up to his time. His speculations iterate to the reader the need to think of and treat mankind's past, present and future on a single continuum. He puts on us the responsibility of consciously remembering that what we do now in the present affects the future, and so 'echoes in enternity'. At the same time, famed historian and scientist Henry Smith Williams compiled something interesting: the "Historian's History of the World", which made use of original sources from the past with modern commentary, so the reader could better see how history was known, and shown, by the writers of past ages.

In the later 1920s and 1930s, groundbreaking new histories appeared by Toynbee, Spengler, Breasted and Robinson. The most popular history specifically with the Western Civilization was begun in the 1930s. It was an 11 volume set written by one author, and appeared over a forty-year span of time! It was called, "The Story of Civilization," by Will Durant. Durant as a young man wrote a philosophy book so many people liked, he could retire at 40 and spend his entire life traveling and coming into contact with the phases of history first hand! Many 20th Century readers found his collected works to be of the finest quality yet written. In fact, along with the H.G. Wells book, this set of books can be found in almost every library in America, including the Hudson Library and PHCC library (which has five copies!). Though it is the story of our own Western Civilization, it did not neglect Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, which appear when those places had something to do with our own history.

In the last fifty years, most 'world histories' have been like the Durant series: Euro-American focused. If you wanted to read about Chinese civilization, you would have find the book specifically on China. But in the early 1960s, a one-volume work appeared by William McNeill, who is sometimes regarded as the 'godfather of AP World History Class'. His thesis dealt with how human beings and their societies have interacted throughout history- how they have affected each other. In that sense, McNeill had something new. The trend had been to consider civilizations separate and self-developing. The book's title, "Rise of the West" gives the impression that it is a story about... the West, and it is, but there is more to it: look at the sub-title (below-left). A return to the universal. McNeill traces Western contacts with everyone else, and their contacts with each other. "Rise of the West" lay the foundations, in fact, for today's AP World textbooks, which contain about 30% Western Civ history and 70% other.

Other great Western Civ books have appeared recently, too, notably "From Dawn to Decadence" by Jacques Barzun, who lived to be over 100 years old and 'saw' 1/5 of the history he writes about happen during the course of his own life!

Finally, our book, "Traditions and Encounters: a Global Perspective on the Past", by Jerry Bentley, keeps with this long tradition of scholarship to teach readers the big-picture story of human life on earth.

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