702 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters . 
century have had a profound influence upon the study of 
history. It has become necessary to include the whole 
world in its scope. At the International Congress of His¬ 
torical Studies in 1913, Bryce, in his presidential address 
said: “The world is becoming one in an altogether new 
sense. ... As the earth has been narrowed through the 
new forces science has placed at our disposal . . . the move¬ 
ments of politics, of economics, and of thought, in each of 
its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever 
happens in any part of the globe has now a significance for 
every other part. World history is tending to become one 
history.” Realizing this, scholars have joined in preparing 
authoritative general histories of various types, such as the 
Oncken in Germany, the Lavisse and Rambaud in France, 
The Cambridge Modern History and The Cambridge Medieval 
History in England. In this country, because of our pov¬ 
erty in historians, it was necessary to meet this need by 
translating and revising a German work. But the United 
States has felt this influence and has provided for a richer 
opportunity in the elementary and high schools and for a 
greater varie ty of instruction in the universities. The devel¬ 
opment of the European field has been the most striking 
feature of the historical work in our universities in the last 
quarter century. Recently Asiatic and South American 
history are being added. In the study of our own history, 
the same influence has been felt, especially in the colonial 
period. In this field the work of our own Professor Root is 
significant. No one of his students will ever believe that our 
history can be understood as that of an isolated section; the 
necessity of studying the administration and history of 
other English co'onies in order to understand our own has 
been made so clear. 
Abroad it has been much more marked; e. g., as Professor 
Kune Meyer has recently stated here, the study of Celtic 
history and literature received a strong impulse from the 
German scholars; and they have been studied as part of the 
general European history. Byzantine history, which was 
long left mainly to Greeks and Russians, received a new 
setting from the English Finlay, and now is studied by a host 
of scholars, especially in Russia, Germany, France, and 
England. It has been found advisable to establish a special 
