the story of mankind
The Story of Mankind written by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, is a vivid story of how we human beings find our way on earth, focusing on the western history. Rather than listing historical events and timeline like any other history books, it tells stories. As the authors wrote, “it is more important to ‘feel history’ than to know it. It’s truly an odyssey when experiencing the rise and fall, the wars and struggle of mankind through words and imagination.
We humans were hunters and foragers form the beginning, and the frontier was everywhere. We were only bounded by the earth, the ocean and the sky. The open road softly calls. We travel and conquer, survive and breed. We create order and break it, establish civilization and destroy it. We love each other and let hate and greed tear us apart. How frequent our misunderstandings, how eager we are to kill one another. That’s us, that’s the history of us. Every king and peasant, every hero and coward, every saint and sinner in history lived out their life on earth, on a pale blue dot in the solar system, on the speck of dust within the galaxy. The earth is a very small stage. But the future is unlimited and unpredictable, and the story of mankind hasn’t unfinished yet. We choose to go to the moon and further. Nature has set no limits to our hopes. But one thing is for certain that it will not be us who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
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