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Image of the physical world, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. [1] The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds".
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. [1] Developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. [2]
Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
History emerged as a field of inquiry in the ancient period to replace myth-infused narratives, with influential early traditions originating in Greece, China, and later also in the Islamic world. Historical writing evolved throughout the ages and became increasingly professional, particularly during the 19th century, when a rigorous ...
Another early modern historian was Adam Ferguson. Ferguson's main contribution to the study of world history was his An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). [26] According to Ferguson, world history was a combination of two forms of history. One was natural history; the aspects of our world which God created.
One of the great works of this time was Humboldt's Kosmos: a sketch of a physical description of the Universe, the first volume of which was published in German in 1845. Such was the power of this work that Dr Mary Somerville, of Cambridge University intended to scrap publication of her own Physical Geography on reading Kosmos. Von Humboldt ...
Topography globe featuring physical features of the Earth. A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but, unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model globe of Earth is called a terrestrial globe.
A 1740 map of Paris. Ortelius World Map, 1570. Historical geography is the branch of geography that studies the ways in which geographic phenomena have changed over time. [1] In its modern form, it is a synthesizing discipline which shares both topical and methodological similarities with history, anthropology, ecology, geology, environmental studies, literary studies, and other fields.