William H. McNeill was the Chairman of the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught for 40 years until his retirement in 1987. He was born in 1917 in Vancouver and educated at the University of Chicago and Cornell University, where his PhD work was interrupted by the Second World War. During the war, McNeill fought in the American army on the European front. After completing his doctorate in 1947, he began teaching at the University of Chicago. McNeill is best known for his argument that contact and exchange between civilizations is the primary driver of history. This view was expounded in his influential book, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which won the U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964. In 1985, he served as president of the American Historical Association. In 1996, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize, and in 1999 The Rise of the West was named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century by Modern Library. In 2010, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. McNeill’s other works include The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, & Community (1992) and The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1982).
In his lecture, McNeill considered questions that he believed to be a universal part of the human experience: “how did things begin, how did they get the way they are, and where are they going?” While almost every person reflects on these questions throughout their life, McNeill argued that they had only given rise to three historical visions of the world: one in ancient China, one among Jewish populations, and one in ancient Greece. After describing these three conceptions of history, McNeill traced the Christian idea of history to the 18th and 19th centuries. McNeill ended by considering the turn in the twentieth century to world history: instead of thinking of European nations as the central actors of the history of humankind, historians increasingly saw the importance of other portions of humanity as complex, rich cultures. In this view of history, Europe and North America were only one of many equal civilizations. As he saw it, world history was a story of progress toward human power, since what has power survives and spreads over time.
McNeill’s lecture was held on February 12, 1968. Listen to an audio recording of the lecture below.