Building on A People’s History of the United States, this radical world history captures the broad sweep of human history from the perspective of struggling classes. An “indispensable volume” on class and capitalism throughout the ages—for readers reckoning with the history they were taught and history as it truly was (Howard Zinn) From the earliest human societies to the Holy Roman Empire, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the Industrial Revolution to the end of the twentieth century, Chris Harman provides a brilliant and comprehensive history of the human race. Eschewing the standard accounts of “Great Men,” of dates and kings, Harman offers a groundbreaking counter-history, a breathtaking sweep across the centuries in the tradition of “history from below.” In a fiery narrative, he shows how ordinary men and women were involved in creating and changing society and how conflict between classes was often at the core of these developments. While many scholars see the victory of capitalism as now safely secured, Harman explains the rise and fall of societies and civilizations throughout the ages and demonstrates that history moves ever onward in every age. A vital corrective to traditional history, A People's History of the World is essential reading for anyone interested in how society has changed and developed and the possibilities for further radical progress.

Richard Neuse here explores the relationship between two great medieval epics, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He argues that Dante's attraction for Chaucer lay not so much in the spiritual dimension of the Divine Comedy as in the human. Borrowing Bertolt Brecht's phrase "epic theater," Neuse underscores the interest of both poets in presenting, as on a stage, flesh and blood characters in which readers would recognize the authors as well as themselves. As spiritual autobiography, both poems challenge the traditional medieval mode of allegory, with its tendency to separate body and soul, matter and spirit. Thus Neuse demonstrates that Chaucer and Dante embody a humanism not generally attributed to the fourteenth century. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

"To be reminded in a utilitarian, materialistic age that the ideals of the Greek mind can quicken culture, even today, is refreshing to heart and soul." R. M. Querido The Christian civilization of the Western would is built on two colums: the heritages of the Old Testament and that of Hellas. This has been know since the days Clement of Alexandria, the found of the first Christian philosophy in the second century A.D., who was by descent a Greek and by faith a Christian. Clement appraised the dialectic of Plato and the metaphysics of Aristotle to be equally significant with the Genesis of Moses and the books of the prophets. In placing the message of the Greeks on the same level as the revelation of the Old Testament, he laid the cornerstone for building a true hhistory of the mission of Hellas. In fact, it is an integral part of the task of this book to show that besides the events in the lives of the Hebrews there was nothing that more immediately prepared humanity for the coming of Christ than what lived in the spirit of Hellas. Hence, the story of the heathen heritage becomes the Gospel of Hellas."