People need to see a pattern in something in order to understand it. The same is true of history. If history is taught without patterns or a sense of historical trends, then it will, of course, amount to an assemblage of trivial names and dates. There is no escaping the need for generalization in history or any other subject. The problem with world history may be that many of its works lack general structures which make sense to people.
World history needs to have a feeling for the dynamics of continuity and change in human societies.
It needs to identify historical turning points that help explain why one period is different from another. In other words, there may be certain natural cleavages in humanity's past experience which it is the historian's business to find. The book, Five Epochs of Civilization , is about finding those turning points which separate one culture or civilization from another. It presents a structure of understanding which may help to see why history has developed as it has and which make it easier to fit facts into their proper place. But this conception of history is only a theory.