Includes index.

The History of the human race on earth is rather like the history of individual human being: important events do not occur in an orderly progression at regularly spaced-out intervals of time, but in irregular pulses. In the life of an individual there are long periods when nothing very exciting appears to be happening, and others of swift change and progress. In the life of nations, the same phases can be observed: on the one hand there is the period following the break-up of the Roman Empire of the West, when the human spirit seems becalmed in a long night; on the other the comparatively short period which sees the powerful ferment of ideas that undermined the ancient regime, and the frenzied eruption of activity we know as the French Revolution. The editor has chosen from the period of recorded history one hundred events which have marked a quickening of the human spirit or have been turning-points in the paths that men have taken. Few of them are: what was Happening Before History Began; The Founding of Rome; The Dawn of the Scientific Thought; The Teachings of Buddha; the Thought of Plato and Aristotle; The Conscience of King Asoka; The Teaching of Jesus; The Destruction of the Roman Empire; The Foundation of Islam; The Introduction of the Jury System; The Invention of Gunpowder; Joan of Arc’s Victories and Martyrdom; Columbus Discovers the New World; Martin Luther Inaugurates the Reformation; The Founding of the East India Company; Discovery of the Blood’s Circulation; The Science of Newton; The Wealth of the Nation; The War of Independence; The French Revolution; Waterloo; Faraday Discovers Electricity; Refrigeration; Invention of the Camera; “Das Kapital”; The Unification of Germany; The Discovery of X-Rays; Freud and the Unconscious Mind; The October Revolution; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; The Battle of Stalingrad; The Emergence of Chinese Communism; The New Agrarian Revolution and many more.