An academic history can mean a large, multivolume work such as the Cambridge Modern History, written collaboratively under some central editorial control.

In the nineteenth century, the idea appeared in universities that a definitive history could be written of a major region of the world for a great span of time in a similar manner to the way that an encyclopedia was written. The time period was subdivided into eras and one volume specified for each. Within each volume there would be a fixed number of topics. Either each volume would either be written by one historian on the faculty, or else each topic would be handled by a faculty member throughout the series of volumes, or perhaps another system of specialization would be prescribed. This procedure was similar to that undertaken on such campuses to produce encyclopedias of natural history, such as marine biology, for which different scholars would write about different phyla. Examples of the end result of this procedure include the series done by Cambridge on Greco-Roman history, and that of Oxford on British history, which may be found on the reserve stacks of many public libraries in the twenty-first century. Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... The city of Cambridge is an old English university town and the regional centre of the county of Cambridgeshire. ... Greco-Roman refers to the culture of Ancient Greece and Classical Rome and reflects the essential unity of the Mediterranean world at the time when those cultures flourished, between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD. Categories: Historical stubs | Ancient Rome | Ancient Greece ... This article is about the city of Oxford in England. ...

What gives this concept of academic history its own historicity, or "cubbyhole in time", superseded by progress, is that an academic history was intended to be definitive even though its subject matter, unlike the marine biology mentioned above, was not objective. When the volume on the Regency was published, for example, some may have thought that such would be the complete history of that era, and no one would need to do as much work in that field, because the best people with the best resources would already have written it down. Subsequent changes in scholarly perspective can alter that perception; for example the work of Lewis Namier on mid-eighteenth century British politics caused one of the Oxford History volumes to appear outdated. A regency is a period when a regent holds power in the name of the current monarch. ... Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (June 27, 1888 - August 19, 1960) was a significant British historian. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ...

It was not considered that entirely new viewpoints and methods would come into being, or that scholars would follow new threads of causality throughout stretches of time that differed from the canonical ones over a region which varied over time. And as each academic history was primarily a list of persons, places, things, and events, there was hardly any Marxian content to any of these projects. By the second half of the twentieth-century, there weren't any more academic histories. History is no longer subdivided in such an assembly-line fashion with such an authoritative result expected. Marxian economics refers to a body of economic thought stemming from the work of Karl Marx. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). ...

However, the project of globalization has brought with it the notion of writing a history that has no national center. All the projects above, allocated to the faculty of a university, had the viewpoint of their country or region in mind. These new histories are similar to the academic, in that they are large and done by many people by a similar process of allocation, but they do not have the same all-specifying concept of classification; instead, it is interrelation which is of concern. Globalization (or globalisation) is a term used to describe the changes in societies and the world economy that are the result of dramatically increased trade and cultural exchange. ...