The Outline of History; Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind Revised and Brought UP to the End of the Second World War by Raymond Postgate

Two Volume Set. Volume I, xvii, [1], 492 pages, with footnotes, maps and illustrations. Volume II, [4], 493-966, [4] pages, with footnotes, maps, illustrations, Chronological Table, and Index. Covers have some wear and soiling. Spines chipped and frayed at top and bottom. Lengthy personal inscription from previous owner on Vol. II fep. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and has been called the "father of science fiction." A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", while Charles Fort called him a "wild talent". Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. James Francis "Frank" Horrabin (1 November 1884 - 2 March 1962) was an English socialist and radical writer and cartoonist. For two years he was Labour Member of Parliament for Peterborough. He attempted to construct a socialist geography. He illustrated H. G. Wells' The Outline of History in 1920. Raymond William Postgate (6 November 1896-29 March 1971) was an English journalist and social historian. The Outline of History, subtitled either "The Whole Story of Man" or "Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind", is a work by H. G. Wells chronicling the history of the world from the origin of the Earth to the First World War. It appeared in an illustrated version of 24 fortnightly installments beginning on 22 November 1919 and was published as a single volume in 1920. It was translated into many languages, and had a considerable impact on the teaching of history in institutions of higher education. Wells modeled the Outline on the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot. Many revised versions were published during Wells's lifetime, and the author kept notes on factual corrections which he received from around the world. The last revision which was published during his lifetime was published in 1937. In 1949, an expanded version was produced by Raymond Postgate, who extended the narrative so it could include the Second World War, and later, he published another version which extended the narrative up to 1969. Postgate wrote that "readers wish to hear the views of Wells, not those of Postgate," and he endeavored to preserve Wells's voice throughout the narrative. In later editions G. P. Wells, the author's son, updated the early chapters about prehistory in order to make them reflect current theories. The final edition appeared in 1971, but earlier editions are still in print. Wells saw in the bards who were, he believed, common to all an important "consequence of and a further factor in [the] development of spoken language which was the chief factor of all the human advances made in Neolithic times. . . . they mark a new step forward in the power and range of the human mind," extending the temporal horizons of the human imagination. He saw in the ancient Greeks another definitive advance of these capacities, "the beginnings of what is becoming at last nowadays a dominant power in human affairs, the 'free intelligence of mankind'." The first individual he distinguishes as embodying free intelligence is the Greek historian Herodotus. The Hebrew prophets and the tradition they founded he calls "a parallel development of the free conscience of mankind." Much later, he singles out Roger Bacon as a precursor of "a great movement in Europe . . . toward reality" that contributed to the development of "intelligence". But "[i]t was only in the eigh. …