Introduction & Overview of A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee

A Study of History Introduction

Arnold Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History is one of the major works of historical scholarship published in the twentieth century. The first volume was published in London in 1934, and subsequent volumes appeared periodically until the twelfth and final volume was published in London in 1961. A two-volume abridgement of volumes 1-10 was prepared by D. C. Somervell with Toynbee's cooperation and published in 1947 (volume one) and 1957 (volume two) in London.

A Study of History in its original form is a huge work. The first ten volumes contain over six thousand pages and more than three million words. Somervell's abridgement, containing only about one-sixth of the original, runs to over nine hundred pages. The size of the work is in proportion to the grandeur of Toynbee's purpose, which is to analyze the genesis, growth, and fall of every human civilization ever known. In Toynbee's analysis, this...
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