The Columbia History of the World [antikvár]

Foreword It is difficult to imagine a more presumptuous title than The Columbia His-tory of the World. Too much has happened to the structure of humán knowledge and alsó to our own self-esteem in recent years to permit us any ease in presumption. Our intellectual capacities are measured by a truly remarkable faculty, but even we recognize that Columbia University is circumseribed by the incredible exponential growth of knowledge in this century. Man's efforts to understand the universe in which he finds himself, the processes by which he evolved, and the historical context of his being are now so formidable that no university can claim omniscience. Certainly we do not. No other title, however, suffices to describe this work accurately. Pro-fessor Peter Gay of Yale University was a Columbia histórián when the project was begun in 1965. Professor John A. Garraty continues to be an eminent member of our Department of History. Together they undertook to edit a large history of the world covering "everything" of historical im-portance from the birth of the universe down to the present day. Their idea was that this work, amounting to nearly half a millión words, would be written entirely by Columbia professors, thus demonstrating that the sum of humán knowledge of the past could be brought together in an authoritative way by the faculty of a single great university. Now their work is done and while somé of the contributors have moved to other responsibilities, the stamp of Columbia is found on every page. We find a balanced and judicious distillation of historical knowledge that is the characteristic mark of open minds. These are not ideologists seeking to con-vert naive readers to preordained views. We have here only wisdom and clarity, characteristics that have illuminated the various departments at Columbia University for more than a century. The reader can peruse this volume, as I have, with the feeling that he is sitting in the midst of professional historians and other scholars as they talk to each other about their specialties. Each offers a capsule view for his colleagues without addressing the enormous wealth of evidence and detail JCV