Academic history

An academic history can be a large, multivolume work such as the Cambridge Modern History, written collaboratively under some central editorial control.

In the 19th century, the idea appeared in universities that a definitive history could be written of a major region of the world for a great span of time in a similar manner to the way that an encyclopedia was written. The time period was subdivided into eras and one volume specified for each. Within each volume there would be a fixed number of topics. Either each volume would either be written by one historian on the faculty, or else each topic would be handled by a faculty member throughout the series of volumes, or perhaps another system of specialization would be prescribed. This procedure was similar to that undertaken on such campuses to produce encyclopedias of natural history, such as marine biology, for which different scholars would write about different phyla. Examples of the end result of this procedure include the series done by Cambridge on Greco-Roman history, and that of Oxford on British history, which may be found on the reserve stacks of many public libraries in the 21st century.