: Where should world history be placed? Background: I have a fictional world in my head. I currently have a sketchbook where I jot down notes, sketch out maps, important people and places: all the usual things I do. The raw

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Your book sounds like one I would put down after a couple of pages. I read books for the characters, what happens to them, what they do, and how they develop, not for the history or mythology of a world that does not exist.
When I read Rhapsody, by Elizabeth Haydon, I was thoroughly intrigued by the emotionally intense and mysteriously rich prologue of the book. I was one of the best pieces of fantasy writing I had ever read. But when I continued with the next chapters, I found myself bored with long sections of background mythology. After the first few of such elaborate deviations from the plot, I began to skip them, browsing the book to where the character story would pick up again. I do not believe in God in this world, and I find the made up gods of a made up world doubly irrelevant. And in fact they were. I didn't need the background to follow the action, because the behavior of the characters was perfectly comprehensible psychologically and did not need a detailed explanation of their religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the story wasn't really dense enough, because all the writer's imagination had gone into the worldbuilding, instead of the story building, so I soon abandoned that book and have never returned to that writer again.
Because of that and similar experiences I have come to believe the advice of many experienced writers to
only include as much background information as is indispensable for the story.
You are not writing an encyclopedia, dictionary, or atlas to the Lord of the Rings, but The Lord of the Rings. And you can use that book as a prime example of how to include background information in a story. What Tolkies does, and what all good authors do, is let the characters interact with their environment in a natural way, and allow the readers to infer the background information from how the characters behave.
All the background that is not readily apparent through the story itself is irrelevant to the story and should not be included. Tolkien wrote many volumes worth of worldbuilding, but he put almost none of it into his masterwork. Many aspiring writers confuse Tolkien's worldbuilding with his writing. But if you actually read the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, you will notice that apart from that introduction about hobbits there is actually very little background information in his books.
If you are very much in love with your effort there, you can offer the background worldbuilding as a bonus on your website, which is in fact a great marketing strategy. But keep it out of your novel.