Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology

Hans Adler received his Dr. phil. degree in 1978 and his habilitation degree in 1987 from the Ruhr-University at Bochum, Germany, where he taught in the German department from 1978 to 1990. He has held visiting professorships in Germany, Canada, and the United States. Since 1990, he has been teaching in the Department of German of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he is professor of German. He has published several books and numerous articles on German literature, philosophy, and the history of aesthetics from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At present, he is president of the International Herder Society., Ernest A. Menze (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Professor Emeritus at Iona College (New Rochelle, New York), where he taught history for thirty-five years. He served as Iona’s Dean of Arts and Science from 1987 until 1994 and is currently Adjunct Professor of History at Edison Community College (Fort Myers, Florida). His numerous publications have focused on modern Germany, with particular emphasis on the works of Johann Gottfried Herder. A former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he has been a visiting professor at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg and has held a senior Fulbright Research Fellowship at the Free University, Berlin. He has also been the recipient of Thyssen Foundation and NEH Awards and is a founding member of the International Herder Society and the World History Association, having served as an officer of the latter., Michael Palma has published The Egg Shape (poems) and translations of Guido Gozzano (The Man I Pretend to Be, Princeton, 1981) and Diego Valeri (My Name on the Wind, Princeton, 1989). He coedited New Italian Poets (Story Line, 1991) with Dana Gioia. His poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Grand Street, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Unsettling America (Viking Penguin).

• Introduction, Adler Hans, Ernest A. Menze; Part 1 Principles of History—Principles of Historiography; Chapter 1 Early Leaves of Critical Groves; Chapter 2 From Journal of my Travels; Chapter 3 From This, too, a Philosophy of History; Chapter 4 Whether We Need to Know the End of History in Order to Write History; Chapter 5 The Nemesis of History; Chapter 6 The “Querelle des anciens et des modernes”; Chapter 7 History; Chapter 8 Expectations for the Coming Century; Part 2 Mythology and Historiography; Chapter 9 On Monuments of the Distant Past; Chapter 10 On the Earliest Documents of Humankind; Part 3 Philosophy of History; Chapter 11 On the Character of Humankind; Chapter 12 On the Term and the Concept “Humanity”; Chapter 13 Preface to the Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind; Chapter 14 The Human Being is Predisposed to the Power of Reason; Chapter 15 Specifically Human Predispositions Besides Reason; Chapter 16 The Nature Of Humankind Manifests Itself In A System Of Spiritual Powers; Chapter 17 The Present State of Humankind Is Probably the Connecting Link between Two Worlds; Chapter 18 The Nature of Peoples in the Vicinity of the North Pole; Chapter 19 The Nature of the Peoples Along the Asian Spine of the Earth; Chapter 20 The Nature of Peoples Favored by the Temperate Zone; Chapter 21 The Nature of the African Peoples; Chapter 22 The Nature of the Peoples on the Islands of the Tropical Zone; Chapter 23 The Nature of the Americans; Chapter 24 The Search for the Origin of Humankind and the Beginning of History on the Basis of Written Sources; Part 4 Reflections on World History; Chapter 25 China; Chapter 26 India; Chapter 27 General Reflections on the History of the Asian States; Chapter 28 Babylonia, Assyria, and Chaldea; Chapter 29 The Hebrews; Chapter 30 Egypt; Chapter 31 Further Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind; Chapter 32 The Language, Mythology, and Poetry of Greece; Chapter 33 Greek Arts; Chapter 34 General Reflections on the History of Greece; Chapter 35 Germanic Peoples; Chapter 36 Slavic Peoples; Chapter 37 Toward a Culture of Reason in Europe; Chapter 38 Concluding Commentary;