Excerpt from A General Sketch of Political History From the Earliest Times History is apt to present itself, not only to the youthful mind, as a haphazard collection of events grouped round a few interesting personalities, the groups of events being unconnected. A stage in advance of this is reached when we realise that English or Roman or Greek history is the story of the progress of a nation in which interesting personalities play only a part. At a third stage we discover that all history is the story of the progress of the human race, in which individual nations play only a part; that the separate histories are not isolated, but act on and are acted on by others; that the history of one period is the outcome of the preceding ages, as the history of the future will be the outcome of the history of the present. This conception of the unity of history as a whole is needful to the right understanding of our own or any other specific history; and an acquaintance, sound so far as it goes, with the ground plan of general history is exceedingly helpful to the conception. The aim of this work is to present such a ground-plan 'sound so far as it goes, ' which may enlarge the horizon of the student without such a multiplication of details as will 'prevent him from seeing the wood for the trees.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.