Concept
World history (field)
Overview
field of historical study. Not to be confused with universal history (genre)
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where World history (field) is discussed.
As is well known, most of the works on world history have been confined to the more restricted field. For them, world history is an account of cultural peoples, whose activities are shown by a continuous tradition and by existing monuments to form a relatively connected whole. But there have also been more comprehensive works, which have felt it necessary to include at least those cultural and semi-cultural peoples…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
World history is the world's judgment seat.
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
states what it is; names the idea
This Chinese, who spoke a little Dutch, happened to be in a bookseller's shop at the same time that some literati were assembled there. He asked for a book; they offered him Bossuet's _Universal History_, badly translated. At the title _Universal History_-- "How pleased am I," cried the Oriental, "to have met with this book. I shall now see what is said of our great empire; of a nation that has subsisted for upwards…
Voltaire, Voltaire's Romances, Complete in One Volume
author linked in the graph
And even in this so-called world-history, which in the main is merely a great deal of noise about the latest novelties, there is no more important theme than the old, old tragedy of the martyrs _who tried to move the mire_. Nothing has been more dearly bought than the minute portion of human reason and feeling of liberty upon which we now pride ourselves.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
names the idea
That is the one fact of World-History worth dwelling on at this day; and Friedrich cannot be said to have had much hand farther in that.
Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 21
names the idea
Philosophers who discussed World history (field)
Related ideas
- Muqaddimah
- History
- Francis Fukuyama
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Historiography
- Herodotus
- Giambattista Vico
- Karl Marx
- Adam Ferguson
- Eurocentrism
- Marxism
- Eric Voegelin
- East Asia
- Ibn Khaldun
- Western culture
- Mandate of Heaven
- Nation
- Oswald Spengler
- Postmodernism
- Renaissance
- Romanticism
- Sima Qian
- Stalinism
- Syncretism
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of science.