For the first time ever, all the historians who have written world history textbooks for students or the general public since the beginning of Western civilization have been brought together. The goal: to ascertain the meaning they found in the whole human story. Some no doubt wrote to fulfill a contractual obligation, but most were concerned about the trajectory of their society. They used the world's history as a grand context within which clues could be found as to the fate of their community. As they did this, they presented the whole story-arc of human life to us on a silver platter, and this book likewise presents the visions they brought forth in their writing, in the order in which they appeared. Nearing the end, in a conclusion Howard Bloom called "anthemic," what emerges is a scintillating philosophical justification for the human colonization of the solar system.