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On This Day: Will Durant, historian and author, was born
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Will Durant, American historian (1961)
November 5, 1885: Will Durant is born in North Adams, Massachusetts. His early education was overseen by Jesuits at St. Peter's Preparatory School. He continued to study at St. Peter's College and graduated in 1907. He first worked as a reporter and then began teaching at Seton Hall College. His subjects were Latin, French, English, and geometry and he was the librarian, as well. He switched jobs and went to Ferrier Modern School, an experimental libertarian venue. He met a young immigrant and quit his job in order to marry his student. Ariel was 15 and he was 28 when they wed.
He began a lecture series and gave talks for $5-10 fees. He gathered his lecture materials together and they became the beginning of his life's work, The Story of Civilization. While working on a doctorate degree in philosophy in 1917, Durant wrote his first book, Philosophy and the Social Problem. His premise was that philosophy foundered because it did not address issues in the real world. It was his belief that the common man should have access to philosophical thought and wrote his treatise as a series of Little Blue Books, pamphlets aimed at workers. It became a bestseller and assured the Durants financial independence.
Durant was a proponent of a wider view of civilization and deplored the Eurocentric notion of history beginning with the Greeks. As he wrote The Story of Civilization, he focused on the entire globe. While including wars, politics, and biographies of the famous, he also included the culture, art, and philosophy of the masses. His "biography of history" included the living conditions of regular people and bludgeoned the readers with his moral imperative. He focused on the "dominance of the strong over the weak, the clever over the simple."
The Story of Civilization began with Our Oriental Heritage and continued through twelve volumes. There are over 2 million words printed on nearly 10,000 pages. Will wrote the first six volumes and acknowledged his wife's help and the last six were co-authored by the couple. The Story is incomplete. The Durants wished to tell the world's story up to the 20th century. While they were both granted long lives, Will died in 1981 at age 96 just weeks after Ariel, they never got to finish their work. It ended with The Age of Napoleon. Their life/love story was published in 1977 – A Dual Autobiography.
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"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it." - Oscar Wilde
"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos." - Will Durant
"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." - Will Durant
"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice." - Will Durant
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." - Will Durant
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