Making Sense of World History is a comprehensive and accessible textbook that helps students understand the key themes of world history within a chronological framework stretching from ancient times to the present day. To lend coherence to its narrative, the book employs a set of organizing devices that connect times, places, and/or themes. This narrative is supported by: Flowcharts that show how phenomena within diverse broad themes interact in generating key processes and events in world history. A discussion of the common challenges faced by different types of agent, including rulers, merchants, farmers, and parents, and a comparison of how these challenges were addressed in different times and places. An exhaustive and balanced treatment of themes such as culture, politics, and economy, with an emphasis on interaction. Explicit attention to skill acquisition in organizing information, cultural sensitivity, comparison, visual literacy, integration, interrogating primary sources, and critical thinking. A focus on historical “episodes” that are carefully related to each other. Through the use of such devices, the book shows the cumulative effect of thematic interactions through time, communicates the many ways in which societies have influenced each other through history, and allows us to compare and contrast how they have reacted to similar challenges. They also allow the reader to transcend historical controversies and can be used to stimulate class discussions and guide student assignments. With a unified authorial voice and offering a narrative from the ancient to the present, this is the go-to textbook for World History courses and students. The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Annotation World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India's Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding their educational experience beyond the textbook. It provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making World History an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.

Economics and U.S. History are intimately interconnected. On a fundamental level, understanding the past helps your students understand our economic system and the keys to economic growth.

World history has expanded dramatically in recent years, primarily as a teaching field, and increasingly as a research field. Growing numbers of teachers and Ph.Ds in history are required to teach the subject. They must be current on topics from human evolution to industrial development in Song-dynasty China to today's disease patterns - and then link these disparate topics into a coherent course. Numerous textbooks in print and in preparation summarize the field of world history at an introductory level. But good teaching also requires advanced training for teachers, and access to a stream of new research from scholars trained as world historians. In this book, Patrick Manning provides the first comprehensive overview of the academic field of world history. He reviews patterns of research and debate, and proposes guidelines for study by teachers and by researchers in world history.

This provocative book challenges the status quo in history eduction by proposing that isolated facts from the past be replaced by knowledge relevant to the future. Not a classroom teaching guide, this book examines the fundamental premises and practices that underlie the work of every history teacher from grade school through graduate school.

People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically across time and cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon but an institution with a dynamic history stretching 10,000 years into the past. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner tell the story of this fundamental unit from the beginnings of domestication and human settlement. They consider the codification of rules governing marriage in societies around the ancient world, the changing conceptions of family wrought by the heightened pace of colonialism and globalization in the modern world, and how state policies shape families today. The authors illustrate ways in which differences in gender and generation have affected family relations over the millennia. Cooperation between family members--by birth or marriage--has driven expansions of power and fusions of culture in times and places as different as ancient Mesopotamia, where kings' daughters became priestesses who mediated among the various cultures and religions of their fathers' kingdom, and sixteenth-century Mexico, in which alliances between Spanish men and indigenous women variously allowed for consolidation of colonial power or empowered resistance to colonial rule. But family discord has also driven - and been driven by - historical events such as China's 1919 May Fourth Movement, in which young people seeking an end to patriarchal authority were key participants. Maynes's and Waltner's view of the family as a force of history brings to light processes of human development and patterns of social life and allows for new insights into the human past and present.

Ross Dunn's classic retelling of the travels of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim of the 14th century.