[1][2] It sold more than two million copies, was translated into many languages, and had a considerable impact on the teaching of history in institutions of higher education.

[4] Many revised versions were published during Wells's lifetime, and the author kept notes on factual corrections which he received from around the world.

The third revised and rearranged edition is organized in chapters whose subjects are as follows: From Neolithic times (12,000–10,000 years ago, by Wells's estimation) "[t]he history of mankind .

"[5] Wells was uncertain whether to place "the beginnings of settled communities living in towns" in Mesopotamia or Egypt.

[11] He saw in the ancient Greeks another definitive advance of these capacities, "the beginnings of what is becoming at last nowadays a dominant power in human affairs, the 'free intelligence of mankind'.

[13] The Hebrew prophets and the tradition they founded he calls "a parallel development of the free conscience of mankind.

[15] But "[i]t was only in the eighties of the nineteenth century that this body of inquiry began to yield results to impress the vulgar mind.

"[16] Although a few passages in The Outline of History reflect racialist thinking, Wells firmly rejected all theories of racial and civilizational superiority.

On the subject of race, Wells writes that "Mankind from the point of view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and possible admixture .

But no professional historian would commit to undertake it, and Wells, in a financially sound position thanks to the success of Mr. Britling Sees It Through and believing that his work would earn little, resolved to devote a year to the project.

He made use of the London Library, and enlisted as critical readers "a team of advisers for comment and correction, chief among them Ernest Barker, Harry Johnston, E. Ray Lankester, and Gilbert Murray.

McKillop's thesis was that Deeks did not receive fair treatment from the courts, which he argued heavily favoured men at that time, both in Canada and in Britain.

He took issue with McKillop's position, arguing that Deeks had a weak case that was not well presented, and though she may have met with sexism from her lawyers, she did receive a fair trial.

They seemed not to realize that, in re-living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative experience, Mr. Wells was achieving something which they themselves would hardly have dared to attempt ...

In fact, the purpose and value of Mr. Wells's book seem to have been better appreciated by the general public than by the professional historians of the day.

The credulous imagination of the times retrospectively assigned miracles and supernatural pretensions to Jesus; a myth grew, and then a church, whose theology at most points was in direct contradiction of the simple, rather communistic teachings of the Galilean.