Περιγραφή
General European history is one of the most perplexing subjects to deal with in the high school. It seems absolutely essential that boys and girls should have some knowledge of the whole past of mankind; without that they can have no real understanding of the world in which they live, for the simple reason that the present can only be explained by the past. The older historical manuals were, in the main, short accounts of past events; but it is really past conditions and past institutions and past ideas that are best worth knowing about. The older books tended, moreover, to give too much attention to the remote past and too little information in regard to recent history, so that there was little chance of the pupil's realizing the vital bearing of the past on the present.