The Story of Mankind

Van Loon opens his history of the world with the test he says he built the whole book on: an event or a person earns a place in it only if the world would look different without them. That test carries him from the earliest writing systems and the river civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome, the medieval church, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the age of exploration, and on into the political revolutions and the aftermath of the First World War, closing near his own moment of writing in 1921. Europe gets most of the pages, though a single chapter reaches east to India and China and shorter passages touch Persia and the Muslim world, always filtered through what Van Loon judged had shaped the civilization he lived in himself. He drew every illustration in the book by hand, loose pen sketches of temples, battles, and portraits scattered directly through the text rather than set apart on separate plates, and he addresses the reader directly and often, arguing his own opinions about tolerance and progress rather than reporting events without a point of view.

That opinionated, conversational voice is what keeps the book readable a century later even where its judgments have not aged well; a reader feels spoken to rather than lectured at, and the short chapters move quickly from one civilization to the next without lingering. Van Loon kept revising the book himself for the rest of his life, adding an essay on the effects of the World War in 1926 and a new epilogue in 1938, and his estate kept extending it after his death in 1944, so a modern reader can find several different versions of the same original argument depending on which printing turns up in a library or a secondhand shop.