The University of Göttingen was the original centre of the "Geschichtswissenschaft" or history as an academic discipline, and became a major centre for globally-orientated anthropology.[1] The school itself was one of the newest universities in Europe, having been founded in 1734 by Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen, and the first to require the obligation to conduct and publish research alongside lecturing.[5] The historians of this school sought to write a universal history by combining the critical methods of Jean Mabillon with that of the philosophical historians such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon.[6]