UUnderstanding Western Society grew out of many conversations we have had among ourselves and with other instructors about the teaching and learning of history. We knew that instructors wanted a Western Civilization text that introduced students to the broad sweep of history but that also re-created the lives of ordinary men and women in appealing human terms. We knew that instructors wanted a text that presented cutting-edge scholarship in new fields of historical inquiry. We also knew that many instructors wanted a text that would help students focus as they read, keep their interest in the material, and encourage them to learn historical thinking skills. It is our hope that Understanding Western Society addresses all of these concerns.
New Tools for Teaching and Measuring Outcomes
With requests for clear and transparent learning outcomes coming from all quarters and with students who bring increasingly diverse levels of skills to class, even veteran teachers can find preparing for today’s courses a trying matter. The introduction of LaunchPad to the second edition offers a breakthrough for instructors. With LaunchPad we have reconceived the textbook as a suite of tools in multiple formats that allows each format do what it does best to capture students’ interest and help instructors create meaningful lessons. But one of the best benefits is that instructors using LaunchPad will find they have a number of assessment tools that allow them to see what their students do and don’t know and to measure student achievement all in one convenient space. For example, LaunchPad comes with LearningCurve — an adaptive learning tool that garners over a 90 percent student satisfaction rate and helps students master book content. When LearningCurve is assigned, the grade book results show instructors where the entire class or individual students may be struggling, which in turn allows instructors to adjust lectures and course activities accordingly — a benefit not only for traditional classes but invaluable for hybrid, online, and newer “flipped” classes as well. In addition, not only can instructors assign all of the questions that appear in the print book and view the responses in the grade book, they have the option to assign automatically graded multiple-choice questions for all of the book features. Plus many more prebuilt activities to foster critical reading and chronological reading skills are available in LaunchPad, along with a test building tool and additional primary sources that all can be used for customized assignments than will report into the grade book for simplified assessment. With LaunchPad for Understanding Western Society, we make the tough job of teaching simpler by providing everything an instructor needs in one convenient space so instructors can set and achieve the learning outcomes they desire. To learn more about the benefits of LearningCurve and LaunchPad, see the “Versions and Supplements” section.
Understanding Western Society: Bringing the Past to Life for Students
At the point when the parent text, A History of Western Society, was first conceptualized, social history was dramatically changing the ways we understood the past, and the original authors decided to create a book that would re-create the lives of ordinary people in appealing human terms, while also giving major economic, political, cultural, and intellectual developments the attention they unquestionably deserve. We three new authors remain committed to advancing this vision for today’s classroom, with a broader definition of social history that brings the original idea into the twenty-first century.
History as a discipline never stands still, and over the last several decades, cultural history has joined social history as a source of dynamism. The focus on cultural history has been heightened in the second edition in a way that highlights the interplay between men’s and women’s lived experiences and the ways men and women reflect on these experiences to create meaning. We know that engaging students’ interest in the past is often a challenge, but we also know that the text’s hallmark approach — the emphasis on daily life and individual experience in its social and cultural dimensions — connects with students and makes the past vivid and accessible.
Additional “Life” Chapters
Although social and cultural history can be found in every chapter, they are particularly emphasized in the acclaimed “Life” chapters that have always distinguished this book. In response to popular demand by reviewers of the previous edition, these have been increased to five in this edition and now include Chapter 4: Life in the Hellenistic World, 336–30 B.C.E. and Chapter 30: Life in an Age of Globalization, 1990 to the Present, which join Chapter 10: Life in Villages and Cities of the High Middle Ages, 1000–1300; Chapter 18: Life in the Era of Expansion, 1650–1800; and Chapter 22: Life in the Emerging Urban Society, 1840–1914.
An Inquiry-based Model Designed for Understanding
By employing innovative pedagogy, we believe that Understanding Western Society helps students not only understand the book’s major developments but also begin to grasp the question-driven methodology that is at the heart of the historian’s craft. Each chapter opens with a NEW chapter-opening question that drives students toward the overarching themes of the chapter, followed by a brief chapter introduction that identifies the most important events and people to be discussed. Section-opening headings expressed as questions and section-ending quick review questions further model the kinds of questions historians ask and help students engage in inquiry-based reading and understanding.
Chapter Study Guides Designed for Active Learning
At the core of Understanding Western Society’s unique pedagogical features are the revised Chapter Study Guides that provide a carefully structured four-step process to help students build deep understanding of the chapter material. In Step 1, students go to LaunchPad to complete the LearningCurve activity, to ensure that they have a grasp of the basic content and concepts of the chapter. In Step 2, students not only identify the chapter’s key terms but also explain why each matters. In Step 3, they begin to apply their understanding of the chapter material through activities that ask them to consider comparison, change over time, or cause and effect. In Step 4, analytical and synthetic questions require students to engage in higher-order historical thinking. And, finally, in an active recitation exercise, students answer the chapter-opening question to realize their understanding of the chapter fully. In LaunchPad, instructors can assign the NEW Guided Reading Exercise for each chapter, which prompts students to read actively to collect information that answers a broad analytic question central to the chapter as a whole.
Primary Sources for Teaching Critical Thinking and Analysis
New assignable Online Document Projects in LaunchPad are tied closely to each chapter of Understanding Western Society. Each assignment, based on either the “Individuals in Society” feature described below or on key developments from the “Life” chapters (Chapters 4, 10, 18, 22, and 30), prompts students to explore a key question through analysis of multiple sources. Chapter 14, for example, asks students to analyze documents on the complexities of race, identity, and slavery in the early modern era to shed light on the conditions that made the story of Juan de Pareja, a mixed-race man who went from a life in slavery to a free artist, possible. The assignments feature a wealth of textual and visual sources as well as video and audio. Assignments based on the “Individuals and Society” feature include three to four documents in each assignment, while those based on the “Life” chapters include six to eight documents. These Online Document Projects provide instructors with a rich variety of assignment options that encourage students to draw their own conclusions, with the help of short-answer questions, multiple-choice questions that provide instant feedback, and a final essay assignment that asks students to use the sources in creative ways.
We have also revised our primary source documents collection, Sources for Western Society, to add more visual sources and to align the readings closely with the chapter topics and themes. Each chapter of the reader also includes a set of related documents called “Sources in Conversation.” The documents are now available in a fully assignable and assessable electronic format within each LaunchPad unit, and the accompanying multiple-choice questions measure comprehension and hold students accountable for their reading.
Student Engagement with Biography
In addition to the primary source program, we are proud of the unique boxed essay feature in each chapter — Individuals in Society — that personalizes larger developments and makes them tangible. These popular biographical essays offer brief studies of individuals or groups, informing students about the societies in which they lived. We have found that readers empathize with these human beings as they themselves seek to define their own identities. The spotlighting of individuals, both famous and obscure, perpetuates the book’s continued attention to cultural and intellectual developments, highlights human agency, and reflects changing interests within the historical profession as well as the development of “micro-history.” NEW features include essays on Anna Jansz of Rotterdam, an Anabaptist martyr; Hürrem, a concubine who became a powerful figure in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century; and Rebecca Protten, a former slave and leader in the Moravian missionary movement. As mentioned previously, the majority of these features are tied to NEW Online Document Projects, available in LaunchPad, that allow students to explore further the historical conditions in which these individuals lived.
Geographic and Visual Literacy
We recognize students’ difficulties with geography and visual analysis, and the new edition retains our Mapping the Past map activities and Picturing the Past visual activities. Included in each chapter, these activities ask students to analyze the map or visual and make connections to the larger processes discussed in the narrative, giving them valuable practice in reading and interpreting maps and images. In LaunchPad, they are assignable, and students can submit their work. Throughout the textbook and online in LaunchPad, more than 75 full-size maps illustrate major developments in the chapter. In addition, 50 spot maps are embedded in the narrative to show specific areas under discussion.
Chronological Reasoning
To help students make comparisons, understand change over time, and see relationships among contemporaneous events, each chapter begins with a chapter chronology that reviews major developments discussed in the chapter. This chronology, available from every page in LaunchPad, allows students to compare developments over the centuries.
Better-Prepared Students
To help students fully understand their reading and come to class prepared, instructors who adopt LaunchPad for Understanding Western Society can assign the LearningCurve formative assessment activities. This online learning tool is popular with students because it helps them rehearse content at their own pace in a nonthreatening, game-like environment. LearningCurve is also popular with instructors because the reporting features allow them to track overall class trends and spot topics that are giving students trouble so they can adjust their lectures and class activities. When LearningCurve is assigned, students come to class better prepared and instructors can better evaluate and adjust their classes.
To further encourage students to read and assimilate the text fully as well as measure how well they do this, instructors can assign the new multiple-choice summative quizzes in LaunchPad, where they are automatically graded. These secure tests not only encourage students to study the book, they can be assigned at specific intervals as high-stakes testing and thus provide another means for analyzing class performance.
Updated Organization and Coverage
To meet the demands of the evolving course, we took a close and critical look at the book’s structure and have made changes in the organization of chapters to reflect the way the course is taught today. Most notably, in addition to consolidating some coverage in the two new “Life” chapters described above, we have combined the three chapters on the High Middle Ages in the previous edition into two (Chapters 9 and 10), restructuring and in some cases shortening sections but retaining all key concepts and topics, resulting in one fewer chapter overall. Chapter 9 now focuses more tightly on political, legal, and institutional developments in church and state, and Chapter 10 on the life of both villagers and city folk.
This edition is also enhanced by the incorporation of a wealth of new scholarship and subject areas that immerse students in the dynamic and ongoing work of history. Chapters 1 through 6 have been revised intensively to incorporate the exciting cross-disciplinary scholarship that has emerged over the last several decades on the Paleolithic and Neolithic, river-valley civilizations, and the ancient Mediterranean. For example, archaeologists working at Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey have unearthed rings of massive, multi-ton, elaborately carved limestone pillars built around 9000 B.C.E. by groups of foragers, which has led to a rethinking of the links among culture, religion, and the initial development of agriculture. Similarly, new research on the peoples of Mesopotamia, based on cuneiform writing along with other sources, has led scholars to revise the view that they were fatalistic, and instead to emphasize that Mesopotamians generally anticipated being well treated by the gods if they behaved morally. Throughout these chapters, new material on cross-cultural connections, the impact of technologies, and changing social relationships has been added, particularly in Chapter 4, which has been recast as “Life in the Hellenistic World.” Other additions include an expanded discussion of the historiography of the fall of the Roman Empire (Chapter 7); new material on the reconquista (Chapter 9); recent ideas on the impact of empire on the Scientific Revolution (Chapter 16); more on the experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, and women in the revolutionary era (Chapter 19); significant updates to the Industrial Revolution coverage, including increased attention to the global context (Chapter 20); revised treatment of ideologies and Romanticism (Chapter 21); new coverage of the popular appeal of nationalism (Chapter 23); new material on orientalism and European imperialism (Chapter 24); extensive updates on the Cold War (Chapter 28); up-to-date coverage of contemporary events in the final chapter, now called “Life in the Age of Globalization, 1990 to the Present,” including the Euro crisis, issues surrounding immigration and Muslims in Europe, and the Arab Spring (Chapter 30).