Joshua Cole - Western Civilizations (Brief Fifth Edition) (Vol. Combined Volume)

THIS BRIEF FIFTH EDITION of Western Civilizations is a landmark in a long and continuing journey. Since the original publication of the Full Edition in 1941, this book has been assiduously updated by succeeding generations of historians who have kept it at the forefront of the field in both scholarship and pedagogical innovation. Our newest edition carries this legacy forward, further honing the tools we have developed to empower studentsour own and yoursto engage effectively with the themes, sources, and challenges of history. It presents a clear and concise narrative of events that unfolded over many thousands of years, supplemented by a compelling selection of primary sources and striking images. At the same time, it features a unified program of pedagogical elements that guide students from understanding core content to reading and analyzing historical sources and, finally, to developing a sophisticated sense of the ways that historians reconstruct the past on the basis of those sources. This framework, and a brand-new set of activities built around select sources from each chapter, helps students to read and interpret historical evidence on their own, encouraging them to become active participants in the learning process and helping them to think historically.

The wide chronological and geographical scope of this book offers an unusual opportunity to trace historical trends across several interrelated regionswestern Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europewhose cultural diversity has been constantly reinvigorated and renewed. Our increasing awareness that no regions history can be isolated from global processes and connections has merely heightened the need for a richly contextualized and broad-based history such as that represented in Western Civilizations. In this edition, we have accordingly supplemented this rich narrative with a new focus on human mobility. From the ancient world to the recent past, societies and cultures have always been shaped by people in motion. Migrationsboth voluntary and coercedare fundamental to understanding human history and have profound implications for the development of the world economy, for cultural exchange among the worlds regions, and for the history of political institutions and their development. Indeed, the study of human mobility has emerged as one of the most vital and important fields of history in recent years. Todays students are deeply interested and invested in the relationship between globalization and population movements, and in the ways that mobility is related to social conflict, environmental changes, and contemporary disagreements about national and ethnic identity. It is important that students be able to put these contemporary discussions in historical context and to see their own concerns and aspirations reflected in the historical curriculum.