The Outline of History

Rating:
Summary: Gave Me a Love for History
Review: Wells is, above all else, a storyteller. And decades before history professors were telling their students to use a narrative approach (i.e. a storyteller approach) to history, Wells was using the approach like a true master. Without this book I would have never gained the love for history which I now have. Wells showed me that history is a vibrant, fluid, and valuable resource which much too often goes untapped. Throughout the Outline he sprinkles his own philosophy which is basically, that education to the masses will make this world the utopia we so wish it could be. Like the great social thinkers (Rousseau comes to mind) Wells teaches us that true freedom exists in our minds and that if we milk the lessons of history for all their worth then maybe we can have a better future.

Rating:
Summary: Gave Me a Love for History
Review: Wells is, above all else, a storyteller. And decades before history professors were telling their students to use a narrative approach (i.e. a storyteller approach) to history, Wells was using the approach like a true master. Without this book I would have never gained the love for history which I now have. Wells showed me that history is a vibrant, fluid, and valuable resource which much too often goes untapped. Throughout the Outline he sprinkles his own philosophy which is basically, that education to the masses will make this world the utopia we so wish it could be. Like the great social thinkers (Rousseau comes to mind) Wells teaches us that true freedom exists in our minds and that if we milk the lessons of history for all their worth then maybe we can have a better future.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad for an amateur
Review: Wells's socialist stance may annoy some, but to me that's not nearly as irritating as his constant use of the term "Aryan" to refer to Indo-Europeans or, more specifically, northern Europeans. The A- word might have been in vogue in the 1920's, but it has been so much abused by Nazis that no self-respecting professional historians would use it nowadays. In Nazi Germany, "Aryans" practically meant Germans with no Jewish ancestry. (This is not to confuse with "Arianism," the ancient Christian sect which bears a close resemblance to Unitarianism. Sir Isaac Newton was a closet Arian.)

Still, Wells managed to cram together an impressive array of facts and figures from the history of the whole world (and not just the Western world). Not a bad job for a non-historian.