The Great Events By Famous Historians

Using The Great Events By Famous Historians as a Research Source

If you've ever pulled one of these volumes off a shelf, you probably noticed the pages are packed with primary-source excerpts—letters, eyewitness accounts, and chronicles embedded right alongside secondary analysis. That's the whole design. The series was put together so readers could read the actual material rather than a summary of it. There's a reason libraries still keep it on the non-circulating reference shelves. Here's how I actually use it, not how a library catalog description would tell you to use it.

The Great Events By Famous Historians Volume Breakdown

The series runs roughly sixteen to eighteen volumes depending on the edition. Each volume is arranged topically and chronologically within its scope. Volume 1 typically covers antiquity through the fall of Rome. The later volumes pick up from the Middle Ages onward. The later editions sometimes split the modern era across multiple volumes because the material gets dense. What most people miss is that the editorial framing matters more than the raw excerpts. The historian who compiled each section didn't just paste text. They chose which documents to include, which to skip, and how much context to provide before and after each excerpt. That editorial voice shapes what you get. It's not neutral. It's someone's opinion about what matters, written decades ago. I ran into this directly when I was researching a paper on the fall of Constantinople in 1456 and again in 1453. The same event appeared in two different volumes with completely different source selections. Volume 8 emphasized Byzantine chroniclers like Doukas and Kritoboulos. Volume 10 shifted toward Ottoman perspectives and Venetian correspondence. Neither volume mentioned the other. If you only read one, you get a thin picture. You have to cross-reference across volumes yourself. The index helps but it's not comprehensive for every name or place that appears in the text.

How to Actually Use the Series Without Wasting Time

Start with the index. The combined index at the back of the set is your entry point. Look up the event, person, or battle you need. The index will point you to the specific volume and page range. Note that page numbers vary between printings. Always verify the volume number before pulling a book. Once you find the relevant section, read the editorial introduction first. It takes five minutes and tells you exactly which sources the editor chose and why. That introduction is where you'll spot the gaps immediately. If the editor wrote that they focused on military accounts, you know civilian perspectives are missing. If they noted the sources are predominantly Western, you know Eastern viewpoints are thin. Then move to the excerpts. Don't read them linearly. Skim first. Look for the documents that actually address your question. A single volume might contain forty or fifty pages of primary material. Most of it is irrelevant to a specific research angle. The excerpt selection leans toward narrative history—battles, treaties, political shifts. Social history, economic data, and daily life tend to appear only incidentally if at all.

That's the real limitation of the series. It's not bad. It's just narrow. If you need information about peasant life in fourteenth-century France or trade routes in the Indian Ocean during the Ming dynasty, you're going to struggle. The series covers events. It doesn't cover structures. Use it for what it is. Don't pretend it's comprehensive.

Common Mistakes People Make

The biggest mistake is treating the excerpts as if they stand alone. They don't. The editor has translated, excerpted, and sometimes paraphrased. A passage might be twenty pages long in the original manuscript. The version in the book could be two paragraphs. Context gets compressed. Always check the source citation at the bottom of each excerpt. The series lists the original author and usually the modern translation or edition it drew from. Look that up if the excerpt feels incomplete or oddly phrased. The second mistake is assuming the chronological flow means the events happened in that order across volumes. They don't. Some volumes overlap in time period. Volume 6 and Volume 7 both cover parts of the medieval period. The editors divided them by theme, not strictly by date. I learned this the hard way when I cited a date from Volume 6 and then found a contradicting date in Volume 7 for the same battle. The dates weren't contradictory. The events were just placed in different thematic sections. Always triangulate dates across volumes.

What to Do When the Series Falls Short

When the excerpts don't give you enough, the series points you toward the original sources. That's actually its strongest feature. Every major excerpt credits its source. Follow those citations. The Bibliography of Sources section at the end of each volume lists full publication details for every document used. That list alone is useful as a research finding aid, even if you never read another word in the book. For deeper work, pair the series with JSTOR or the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. The Medieval Sourcebook at Fordham University has many of the same primary texts available online with fuller translations. Cross-checking the series excerpts against the online versions revealed several cases where the series had selected a particularly dramatic translation over a more accurate one. Not always. But often enough that verification pays off. The series also doesn't cover events after its latest publication date with any freshness. New archaeological findings, newly discovered manuscripts, and revised historical interpretations aren't reflected. The volumes for the twentieth century are especially dated because so much scholarship has moved on since they were printed. Use them for the original documents, not for the historiography.

A Practical Workflow

Find your event in the combined index. Pull the recommended volume. Read the editorial introduction for bias and scope notes. Skim the excerpts for relevant material. Note every source citation. Look up the full original where the excerpt feels truncated. Cross-reference with at least one other volume covering the same period. Verify dates and names against a digital source if possible. Then move on. This process takes about twenty minutes per event if you know what you're doing. It takes two hours if you don't. The series is still one of the most accessible collections of primary source excerpts in print. It's not the final word. It's a starting point. Treat it like one and it serves you well.