The best book to understand today’s world. Drawing on the themes and scholarship they emphasize in their own classrooms — as well as users’ feedback — the authors provide students with the information they need to understand the modern relevance of Western history. This edition includes new material on gender, class, and religious reform, continues to offer the best sustained treatment of Islam, and features additional coverage of crucial topics with modern relevance — including the roots of the conflict in the Middle East and the use of torture in the colonial world — that helps students to make sense of their own times.
An expanded global context takes students beyond Europe’s borders. The authors have expanded and enhanced the book’s signature global context, strategically bringing in more exchanges with non-European areas such as the Middle East, China, and Africa. By viewing the West as an evolving construct, shaped by cross-cultural exchanges and borrowings, students are better able to understand both the development of the historical West and the West as they know it today.
Five skill-building features, now with NEW questions for analysis, introduce students to the discipline. Now with additional “Questions for Consideration,” the book’s five features — Seeing History, Terms of History, Contrasting Views, New Sources/New Perspectives, and Taking Measure — and extensive built-in primary documents help students to hone a range of historical skills, including analyzing visual and written sources; understanding the diversity of historical perspectives; exploring historiography and the process of historical analysis; and evaluating quantitative data. Reviewed with users, these features provide valuable built-in tools for classroom use and assignments.
NEW end-of-chapter activities help students to synthesize information. Revitalized Chapter Review sections feature new, dynamic activities asking students not only to identify each chapter’s key terms, but to consider their importance in context. New chronology-based questions prompt students to consider connections between events and explore contingency and causality. Additional “Making Connections” questions provide students with further opportunities to improve their understanding of each chapter’s historical context.
Enhanced media resources give you options for saving time and improving student learning. We know that your classroom changes every year, and so do our resources. Whether you’re interested in substantive lecture presentation materials, free online student quizzing, plentiful upgraded test questions, free primary documents — or all of the above — we have options in PowerPoint, on DVD, or uploadable for integration with your local course management system. And if you want it all in one customizeable course space, check out HistoryClass, at yourhistoryclass.com.