Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
For the better part of three years the writer of these noteshas been occupied almost entirely in an intensely interestingenterprise. He has been getting his own ideas about thegeneral process of history into order and he has been settingthem down, having them checked by various people, andpublishing them as a book, The Outline of History, whichboth in America and Europe has had a considerable vogue.In volumes or in complete sets of parts it has already foundover two hundred thousand purchasers; it is still beingbought in considerable quantities, and it is being translatedand published in several foreign languages; it is quitepossible that it has sufficiently interested almost as manypeople to read it through as it has found purchasers to takethe easier step of buying it.
This Outline of History did not by any means contain allthe history the writer himself would like to know or oughtto know, and much less did it profess to condense all historyfor its readers. But it did attempt to sketch a framework,which people might have in common, and into whicheveryone might fit his own particular reading and historicalinterests. It did try to give all history as one story.4And the largeness of the measure of its success is certainlymuch more due to the widespread desire for such anOutline than to any particular merit of the particularOutline the writer produced. So far as reception goes,almost any enterprising person might have succeededas the writer has succeeded. He was, as people say,“meeting a long-felt want.” But his years of work inmeeting it have necessarily made him something of aspecialist in historical generalities, and the adventure ofmaking and spreading the Outline abroad has been fullof interesting and suggestive experiences. Some of thecriticism to which the Outline has been subjected affordsan opportunity for profitable comment. To “answer” allits critics would be a preposterously self-important thing todo, but, from the point of view of our general education,some of them do repay examination. And accordingly heis setting down these present notes to the Outline; partlycomments upon the educational significance of its generalreception and partly a consideration of the mental attitudes,the moral and intellectual pose, into which it has throwncertain of its critics.
A most fruitful question the writer found was this:“Why was it left for me in 1918 to undertake