A controversial historian, Arnold Joseph Toynbee is best known for his 12-volume work entitled A Study of History (1934-1961). He was born in London on April 14, 1889, into a scholarly, upper middle class family. His Uncle Arnold was a well-known English economist who wrote a history of Britain's Industrial Revolution in 1884. Toynbee's father, Harry, was a social worker and his mother, Edith, was one of the few women of the Victorian Era with a college degree. Wrote Toynbee some years later, "I am an historian because my mother was one."

Toynbee was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a degree in the classics in 1911. His interest in Greek and Latin led him to the British Archeological School in Athens for a short time. He walked about the Greek countryside constantly. "Few men knew Greece so well as Arnold Toynbee," claimed an article in the Times Literary Supplement.

In 1912, Toynbee...