In this article, the author reviews several books on world history from the 1920s to the 1940s. These include books authored by a diverse group: H.G. Wells, "Outline of History" (Macmillan, 1920); James Henry Breasted, "Ancient Times, A History of the Early World" (published in 1916 by Ginn and Company and largely rewritten in 1935); M. Rostovzeff, "A History of the Ancient World" (written in Russian between 1921 and 1923; Oxford University Press, 1926); Christopher Dawson, "The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East" (John Murray, 1928); and V. Gordon Childe's widely read "Man Makes Himself" (Mentor, 1936) and "What Happened in History" (Penguin, 1942). These works, each in its own way, presented human history as a directional process of cumulative learning, not only in terms of technically useful knowledge but also of moral-practical ideas. Their basic message, even if not always explicitly stated, was that world history was a "universal" learning process that could be reconstructed on the basis of distinct eras and "successive" stages. It was a West-centered message, but one which tried, as much as the sources available at the time allowed, to understand the contributions of non-Western cultures. Each of these books contained detailed sections on all the major civilizations of the ancient world. (Contains 98 footnotes.)