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A Textbook for the Enlightenment of Twelfth-Graders in Our Tax-supported Public High Schools
Introduction
History is the record of man’s spiritual voyage through time and space to discover the parameters of his own true nature. In my youth, the world of Christianity, built on the ruins of the Greco-Roman civilization, extended from the oriental frontiers of Russia to the Pacific shores of North and South America. That was what religious folk called “Christendom” and historians called “Western Civilization.”
Christendom was flanked on the east by the lands of Buddha, Lao- tse, and Confucius. It covered the entire Orient.
The world of Islam ran from Pakistan to the farthest edge of Morocco, and in Africa extended nearly to the Equator.
The return in 1947, after 2000 years, of the exiled sons of Moses to Israel has produced that present day disruption in the fabric of Moslem civilization which we now call the Middle East Crisis.
History, to offer my own definition, is the story of man’s search for the Meaning of Man and his relation to the infinite universe.
It is my high pleasure to commend for study by young Americans this story of the inescapable linkage between man’s political history and his religions.
Clare Boothe Luce
Contents
Foreword.
Preface
Introduction
- Have We Dropped Something When No One Was Paying Attention?
- Each to His Owr.
- Who? What? Where? Why?
- A Letter and a Little Geography
- We Continue the Quest
- From Fantasy Back to Reality
- A Further Look at Europe
- The Dark Continent of Africa
- The Brighter Side
- A Different Theater with Changes in the Cast
- Small but Important
- A Pause to Remember
- We Move to the Far East
- Confucianism
- Taoism
- Shintoism
- Echoes from Earlier Chapters
- Communism
- The Missionary Movement
- Epilogue
