Can I just use Genevieve Fosters books and skip Van Loons Story of Mankind, or vice versa?
Advisory member Lynn responds: Just to be clear, Van Loon and Foster fill two distinctly different purposes in the history sequence. Probably the quickest way to explain this is to let CM do it — from Volume 6, p. 178 “It is a great thing to possess a pageant of history in the background of one’s thoughts. We may not be able to recall this or that circumstance, but, ‘the imagination is warmed’; we know that there is a great deal to be said on both sides of every question and are safe from crudities in opinion and rashness in action. The present becomes enriched for us with the wealth of all that has gone before.” and that would describe the reason for Van Loon (and Hillyer). As for G. Foster’s books… from Volume 1, p. 280 “The fatal mistake is in the notion that he must learn ‘outlines’, or a baby edition of the whole history of England, or of Rome, just as he must cover the geography of all the world. Let him, on the contrary, linger pleasantly over the history of a single man, a s
