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II. Read and translate the text: world history

World History is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective.

Unlike most history writing of the 19 th and most of the 20 th centuries, which focused on narratives of individuals, and on national and ethnic perspectives, World History looks for common patterns that emerge across all cultures. World historians use a thematic approach, with two major focal points: integration (how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together) and difference (how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experience).

The study of world history is in some ways a product of the current period of accelerated globalization. This period is tending both to integrate various cultures and to highlight their differences.

The advent of World History as a distinct field of study was heralded in the 1980's by the creation of the World History Association and of graduate programs at a handful of universities. Over the past 20 years, scholarly publications, professional and academic organizations, and graduate programs in World History have proliferated. It has become an increasingly popular approach to teaching history. Many new textbooks are being published with a World History approach.

Many works are analogous to World History, in that they discuss "the history of the world" in a unified framework — for example; it was a genre popular in the 19th century with universal history, and with Christian historians going back to at least the 4th century. Shortly after World War I several popular books were written which dealt with the history of the world, though with a somewhat different approach. These included the children's book The Story of Mankind (1921) by Hendrik Willem van Loon and the textbook The Outline of History (1918) by H.G. Wells.

The history of the world is human history from the first appearance of Homo sapiens to the present. Human history is marked both by a gradual accretion of discoveries and inventions, as well as by quantum leaps — paradigm shifts, and revolutions — that comprise epochs in the material and spiritual evolution of humankind.

Human history, as opposed to prehistory, has in the past been said to begin with the invention, independently at several sites on Earth, of writing, which created the infrastructure for lasting, accurately transmitted memories and thus for the diffusion and growth of knowledge. Writing, in its turn, had been made necessary in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution, which had given rise to civilization, i.e., to permanent settled communities, which fostered a growing diversity of trades.

Such scattered habitations, centred about life-sustaining bodies of water — rivers and lakes — coalesced over time into ever larger units, in parallel with the evolution of ever more efficient means of transport. These processes of coalescence, spurred by rivalries and conflicts between adjacent communities, gave rise over millennia to ever larger states, and then to super states or empires. The fall of the Roman Empire in Europe at the end of antiquity signalled the beginning of the Middle Ages.

In the mid-15 th century, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of modern printing, employing movable type, revolutionized communication, helped end the Middle Ages and ushered in modern times, the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.

By the 18 th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology, especially in Europe, had reached a critical mass that sparked into existence the Industrial Revolution. Over the quarter-millennium since, knowledge, technology, commerce, and — concomitantly with these — war have accelerated at a geometric rate, creating the opportunities and perils that now confront the human communities that together inhabit a planet of scarce resources.