"One of the most important, imaginative, solidly documented, well written books of medieval history that I have ever read. . . . It offers a unique combination of synthetic power and analytic perception, of bold judgment and Cartesian doubt, of hard economic facts and subtle psychological considerations."--

Covering Western history from the ancient world to the current era of globalization, The Modernization of the Western World describes the forces of social change and what they have meant to the lives of the people caught up in them. The volume presents the history of Western civilization from a historical sociology perspective, introducing readers to the analyses of thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber, in order to provide tools for understanding how societies function and change. This application of modernization theory argues, not that what has happened in the West should or even must happen in non-Western societies, but that understanding modernization as a process of social change affords a better understanding of why and how life has changed over the past millennium. The interactions of Western and non-Western societies have had a profound effect on each other; this is the story of the development of a truly global economy. This new edition has been updated to include a final chapter which addresses recent developments—economic disturbances in the global marketplace, cyberwarfare, and the rise of populist movements—testing the relevance of classic modernization theory for today. Featuring a glossary, maps and illustrations, boxed features, and an extensive index, this book will be of particular interest to students looking to understand world history as well as those interested in historical sociology and modernization theory.

Part One examines the late medieval northern Italian city-state republics and the humanist depiction of their form of polity. Part Two reviews the legal (principally canonical) and political thought behind the development of a theory of popular consent and limited authority employed to resolve the Great Schism in the Western church. Part Three describes sixteenth-century Spanish neoscholastic political writings and their application to Reformation Europe and Spanish colonial expansion in the New World. Part Four examines the political thought of some of those who responded to new problems in church/state relations caused by the fracturing of medieval Christendom in the West: Luther, Calvin, and other Reformation writers; the Protestant resistance pamphleteers; and Richard Hooker. Featuring an extensive bibliography, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights will be of specific interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of political ideas and political theories and students in history, political science, and religious studies.

Dr. Ekberg's masterwork on the old French town south of St. Louis brings into sharp focus life in colonial America. Ekberg has rendered a rich portrait of community life on the most fascinating of American frontiers, the composite world of French Creoles and American Indians in the Mississippi Valley. This is an important book and a good read to boot. That's how Yale University's John Mack Faragher praised this book.