inessential by Brent Simmons

History

I’ve been reading this book on Western history: it’s a general, chronological textbook, starting with the earliest Tigris and Euphrates civilizations and continuing to the near-present.

I just got to the Renaissance last night. Wow! It’s like fireworks going off.

If I had to write a capsule history of Western civilization, it would go like this:

Prehistory. Then the explosion of philosophy and art in Greece and Rome. Then a long period of near-total forgetting. Then the Renaissance!