Understanding that a global humanities course is taught in varying ways, Gloria Fiero redefines the discipline for greater flexibility with the 7th Edition of The Humanistic Tradition. Enhanced by McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart® and SmartBook®, Fiero delivers a learning experience tailored to the needs of each institution, instructor, and student. With the ability to incorporate new extended readings, streaming music, and artwork, The Humanistic Tradition renews the understanding of the relationship between world cultures and humankind’s creative legacy. McGraw-Hill Connect Humanities is the only integrated learning system that empowers students by continuously adapting to deliver precisely what they need, when they need it, so that your class time is more engaging and effective. It provides tools that make assessment easier, learning more engaging, and studying more efficient. **Available exclusively on McGraw-Hill Create®, the Traditions Collection contains western and non-western readings as well as ancient and contemporary offerings, hand selected from a number of different disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, and science. Find the readings here: www.mcgrawhillcreate.com/traditions

Interdisciplinary in approach and topical in focus, the sixth edition of The Humanistic Tradition continues to bring to life humankind's creative legacy. With more than 800 illustrations and some 150 literary sources in accessible translations, this widely acclaimed humanities survey takes a global perspective that is at once selective and engaging, and helps students better understand the relationship between world cultures. Available in multiple formats, The Humanistic Tradition examines the political, economic, and social contexts out of which history's most memorable achievements emerged.

The Human Journey offers a truly concise yet satisfyingly full history of the world from ancient times to the present. Its themes include not only the great questions of the humanities—nature versus nurture, the history and meaning of human variation, the sources of wealth, and causes of revolution—but also the major transformations in human history: agriculture, cities, iron, writing, universal religions, global trade, industrialization, popular government, justice, and equality. Beginning with our most important questions and searching all of our past for answers, this is world history in a grand humanistic tradition.

Understanding that a global humanities course is taught in varying ways, Gloria Fiero redefines the discipline for greater flexibility with the 7th Edition of The Humanistic Tradition. Enhanced by McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart® and SmartBook®, Fiero delivers a learning experience tailored to the needs of each institution, instructor, and student. With the ability to incorporate new extended readings, streaming music, and artwork, The Humanistic Tradition renews the understanding of the relationship between world cultures and humankind’s creative legacy. McGraw-Hill Connect Humanities is the only integrated learning system that empowers students by continuously adapting to deliver precisely what they need, when they need it, so that your class time is more engaging and effective. It provides tools that make assessment easier, learning more engaging, and studying more efficient. **Available exclusively on McGraw-Hill Create®, the Traditions Collection contains western and non-western readings as well as ancient and contemporary offerings, hand selected from a number of different disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, and science. Find the readings here: www.mcgrawhillcreate.com/traditions

Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

A team of leading scholars survey the development of philosophy in the period of extraordinary intellectual change from the mid-16th century to the early 18th century. They cover metaphysics and natural philosophy; the mind, the passions, and aesthetics; epistemology, logic, mathematics, and language; ethics and political philosophy; and religion.