A civilization is any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond signed or spoken languages.
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere.
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German polymath whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan.
World history or global history as a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; some leading practitioners are Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active in the late 20th century.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1929 to 1956 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain.
Arnold Toynbee was an English economic historian also noted for his social commitment and desire to improve the living conditions of the working classes.
Jacob Leib Talmon was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Peter Chardon Brooks Adams was an American attorney, historian, political scientist and a critic of capitalism.
Christopher Henry Dawson was an English Catholic historian, independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and emphasized the necessity for Western culture to be in continuity with Christianity not to stagnate and deteriorate. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century" and was recognized as being able to expound his thought to "Catholic and Protestant, Christian and non-Christian."
Pieter Catharinus Arie Geyl was a Dutch historian, well known for his studies in early modern Dutch history and in historiography.
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community is a book by University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, first published in 1963 and enlarged with a retrospective preface in 1991. It explores world history in terms of the effect different old world civilizations had on one another, and especially the deep influence of Western civilization on the rest of the world in the past 500 years. He argues that societal contact with foreign civilizations is the primary force in driving historical change. In 1964 it won the National Book Award in History and Biography.
In Marxism, proletarianization is the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer.
Comparative history is the comparison of different societies which existed during the same time period or shared similar cultural conditions.
Macrohistory seeks out large, long-term trends in world history in search of ultimate patterns by a comparison of proximate details. It favors a comparative or world-historical perspective to determine the roots of changes as well as the developmental paths of society or a historical process.
Societal collapse is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline or overshoot, mass migration, incompetent leaders, and sabotage by rival civilizations. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
David Churchill Somervell was an English historian and teacher. He taught at three well-known English public schools – Repton, Tonbridge and Benenden – and was the author of several volumes of history and the editor of well-regarded abridgements of other historians' works.
William Hardy McNeill was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987. In 1980-81 he held the George Eastman Professorship at the University of Oxford.
Comparative studies of the Roman and Han empires is a historical comparative research involving the roughly contemporaneous Roman Empire and the Han dynasty of early imperial China. At their peaks, both states controlled up to a half of the world population and produced political and cultural legacies that endure to the modern era; comparative studies largely focus on their similar scale at their pinnacles and on synchronism in their rise and decline.
The proletariat is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose possession of significant economic value is their labour power. A member of such a class is a proletarian or a proletaire. Marxist philosophy regards the proletariat under conditions of capitalism as an exploited class forced to accept meager wages in return for operating the means of production, which belong to the class of business owners, the bourgeoisie.
Bibliography of world history (field).
