There are many ways to tell the history of the world. Oral histories that were later written down, including the Book of Genesis, the Rig Veda, and the Popul Vuh, focused especially on the actions of gods and on human/divine interactions. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus drew on such oral traditions along with eyewitness testimony to provide deep background for his story of the war between the Persians and the Greeks, setting this within the context of the world as he knew it. The ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian told history through an encyclopedic presentation of events, activities, and biographies of emperors, officials, and other important people, beginning with the semi-mythical first sage rulers of China. The tenth-century Muslim historian Abu Ja'far al-Tabari began before the creation of Adam and Eve, and used biblical, Greek, Roman, Persian, and Byzantine sources to present history as a long and unbroken process of cultural transmission. Dynastic chroniclers in medieval Europe and Mughal India often began their accounts with the creation of the world to devise “universal histories,” then moved quickly through the millennia, slowing down as they neared the present to focus on political developments in their own locale. Histories that had a broad scope were among the flood of books produced after the development of printing technology in the fifteenth century, most written by highly learned male scholars, but some by poets, nuns, physicians, obscure officials, former slaves, and others. With the expansion of literacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, authors wrote world histories full of moral lessons, some of them designed specifically for children or female readers.

Throughout much of the twentieth century scholarly history focused on nations, but world history did not disappear. For example, right after the devastation of World War I, and in part as a response to the slaughter, H.G. Wells wrote The Outline of History, which told the history of the world as a story of human efforts to “conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily.” Readers could buy this in cheap bi-weekly installments, just as they had Wells’ earlier novel The War of the Worlds, and millions did.