Wells’s two-volume Outline of History, published in 1920, was the first general history constructed on an evolutionary, sociological and anthropological basis. It was immensely popular and set the basis for this Short History, which Wells created “to meet the needs of the busy general reader, too driven to study the maps and time charts of that Outline in detail, who wishes to refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of mankind.”

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