My concerns with world history are several. Perhaps I can outline some of the points at which I think world history is important, and this will be more useful than anything else, for it leads to everything else. In the first place, while all historical study results from the fact that people already have some sort of sense or image of history, which it is desirable to refine and correct, this is especially true in the case of world history. Our image of the physical and temporal pattern of the human world as a whole, is fundamental to our sense of who we are. No one is without some image of the sort, however crude. The problem of the person who would present world history is to move from whatever images his students have, to a more satisfactory image. Of course, this does not mean that he will first take a survey of what images are present and then proceed to correct each one. Pedagogically, this would be too clumsy. Yet one of his most important functions is to do something like this in effect.

There are several images of the world likely especially to appear among the American public. One is a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” image. This is almost always far more refined in college students than it is on the Sunday-school level, but it has far more profound effects on the world-historical image than merely the establishment of the dividing point between B.C. and A.D. A second image that will occur occasionally, and is more significant generally than might be expected from its explicit occurrences, is the Marxist image of world history.