Synopses & Reviews
Noted teachers and scholars William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel present a balanced, highly readable overview of world history that explores common challenges and experiences that unite the human past and that identify key global patterns over time. Thorough coverage of political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, cultural, and military history has been integrated into a chronologically ordered synthesis to help students gain an appreciation and understanding of the distinctive character and development of individual cultures in society. This edition of WORLD HISTORY continues to take a global approach to world history, with an emphasis on analytical comparisons between and among cultures throughout history. This approach helps students' link events together in a broad comparative and global framework, thereby placing the contemporary world in a more meaningful historical context. WORLD HISTORY is available in the following volume options: WORLD HISTORY, FIFTH EDITION (Chapters 1-29)
Review
"This is a high-quality text. I appreciate D/S's emphasis on World History, as it is supported by solid presentation of geography, major events, leading biographies, and significant social and cultural themes. The book is a serious tool for the study of History at the college level. The book's approach blends art, architecture, maps, and quotations, making the D/S World History book a more complete package than some other similar texts. Students who study this book thoroughly will acquire a sound background of the historical forces at work in the world's from early times to the present. Students will be exposed to the world's major cultures, and the central events, issues, and trends that have shaped them. As is stated on pg. xxiv of the Preface, this text is to be well-balanced, avoiding some of the typical over-emphases that often characterize approaches to history survey courses today: a narrow focus on politics and thought or, at the other end of things, a social emphasis that can seem to exclude major events, figures, and other specific facts."
Review
"Far more than other world and western surveys, the Duiker/Spielvogel texts provide instructors with a large amount of quality, primary documentary material. ... The documents are well-chosen and edited, and provide instructors with many opportunities to draw students into discussion and give them a good understanding of how historians interpret the raw data of the past."
Review
"As a general world history text, (Duiker/Spielvogel) provides a comprehensive text that is appropriate for an undergraduate world history course. It avoids the tendency to be a fact-based text, where students are simply given a list of events and general themes to be regenerated on the exam. In other words, your text does not amount to a mindless dispensing of innumerable facts. Besides this, the text is a thorough survey of the movements of people, ideas and goods, and it achieves the goal of globalizing history by crossing intellectual, institutional and international boundaries."
Review
"(B)ased on my experience, this is the best World History text I have found."
Review
"I have been using editions of this text for several years in my History of World Civilization I classes, and although I have reviewed several other competitors, I remain convinced that this is the best overall work for my classes. The writing is generally clear and interesting, the maps and chronologies are useful, the text boxes are enlightening and the illustrations are usually excellent."
Synopsis
This is Volume I: To 1800 of WORLD HISTORY, Fourth Edition. Noted teachers and scholars William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel present a balanced picture of world history, with all respect for the richness and diversity of the tapestry of the human experience. Critically and popularly acclaimed, their comprehensive text balances a global approach with attention to the unique character and development of civilization in divergent parts of the world. The text covers individual civilizations such as China, India, and Europe, with due attention paid to the rise of the West, and provides points of comparison between and among these civilizations. A wealth of primary-source documents, maps, and supplements enhance students' experience with the material. WORLD HISTORY is available in the following volume splits: WORLD HISTORY, Fourth Edition (Chapters 1-29)
Synopsis
This is Volume I: To 1800 of WORLD HISTORY, Fourth Edition. Noted teachers and scholars William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel present a balanced picture of world history, with all respect for the richness and diversity of the tapestry of the human experience. Critically and popularly acclaimed, their comprehensive text balances a global approach with attention to the unique character and development of civilization in divergent parts of the world. The text covers individual civilizations such as China, India, and Europe, with due attention paid to the rise of the West, and provides points of comparison between and among these civilizations. A wealth of primary-source documents, maps, and supplements enhance students' experience with the material. WORLD HISTORY is available in the following volume splits: WORLD HISTORY, Fourth Edition (Chapters 1-29)
About the Author
William J. Duiker is liberal arts Professor Emeritus of East Asian studies at The Pennsylvania State University. A former U.S. diplomat with service in Taiwan, South Vietnam, and Washington, D.C., he received his doctorate in Far Eastern history from Georgetown University in 1968, where his dissertation dealt with the Chinese educator and reformer Cai Yuanpei. At Penn State, he has written extensively on the history of Vietnam and modern China, including the highly acclaimed THE COMMUNIST ROAD TO POWER IN VIETNAM (revised edition, Westview Press, 1996), which was selected for a Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award in 1982?1983 and 1996?1997. Other recent books are CHINA AND VIETNAM: THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT (Berkeley, 1987), SACRED WAR: NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION IN A DIVIDED VIETNAM (McGraw-Hill, 1995), and HO CHI MINH (Hyperion, 2000), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He is the author, with colleague Jackson Spielvogel, of WORLD HISTORY (Sixth Edition, Wadsworth, 2010). While his research specialization is in the ?eld of nationalism and Asian revolutions, his intellectual interests are considerably more diverse. He has traveled widely and has taught courses on the history of communism and non-Western civilizations at Penn State, where he was awarded a Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the spring of 1996.Jackson J. Spielvogel is associate professor Emeritus of history at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, where he specialized in Reformation history under Harold J. Grimm. His articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as "Moreana," "Journal of General Education," "Catholic Historical Review," "Archiv f?r Reformationsgeschichte," and "American Historical Review." He also has contributed chapters or articles to "The Social History of Reformation," THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE: A DICTIONARY HANDBOOK, "Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual of Holocaust Studies," and "Utopian Studies." His work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Foundation for Reformation Research. At Penn State, he helped inaugurate the Western civilization course, as well as a popular course on Nazi Germany. His book HITLER AND NAZI GERMANY was published in 1987 (Fourth Edition, 2001). He is the author of WESTERN CIVILIZATION, first published in 1991 (Seventh Edition, 2009). He is the co-author (with William Duiker) of WORLD HISTORY, first published in January 1994 (Sixth Edition, 2010). Professor Spielvogel has won five major university-wide teaching awards. During the year 1988-1989, he held the Penn State Teaching Fellowship, the university's most prestigious teaching award. In 1996, he won the Dean Arthur Ray Warnock Award for Outstanding Faculty member, and in 2000 received the Schreyer Honors College Excellence in Teaching Award.
Table of Contents
"As a general world history text, (Duiker/Spielvogel) provides a comprehensive text that is appropriate for an undergraduate world history course. It avoids the tendency to be a fact-based text, where students are simply given a list of events and general themes to be regenerated on the exam. In other words, your text does not amount to a mindless dispensing of innumerable facts. Besides this, the text is a thorough survey of the movements of people, ideas and goods, and it achieves the goal of globalizing history by crossing intellectual, institutional and international boundaries." "I have been using editions of this text for several years in my History of World Civilization I classes, and although I have reviewed several other competitors, I remain convinced that this is the best overall work for my classes. The writing is generally clear and interesting, the maps and chronologies are useful, the text boxes are enlightening and the illustrations are usually excellent." "Far more than other world and western surveys, the Duiker/Spielvogel texts provide instructors with a large amount of quality, primary documentary material. ... The documents are well-chosen and edited, and provide instructors with many opportunities to draw students into discussion and give them a good understanding of how historians interpret the raw data of the past." "This is a high-quality text. I appreciate D/S's emphasis on World History, as it is supported by solid presentation of geography, major events, leading biographies, and significant social and cultural themes. The book is a serious tool for the study of History at the college level. The book's approach blends art, architecture, maps, and quotations, making the D/S World History book a more complete package than some other similar texts. Students who study this book thoroughly will acquire a sound background of the historical forces at work in the world's from early times to the present. Students will be exposed to the world's major cultures, and the central events, issues, and trends that have shaped them. As is stated on pg. xxiv of the Preface, this text is to be well-balanced, avoiding some of the typical over-emphases that often characterize approaches to history survey courses today: a narrow focus on politics and thought or, at the other end of things, a social emphasis that can seem to exclude major events, figures, and other specific facts." "(B)ased on my experience, this is the best World History text I have found."