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Dear Students in AP^® European History:

Greetings to you as you begin your European history course. The three of us (Clare Haru Crowston, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, and Joe Perry) are the current authors of this book, and we want you to know that we were all once like you, high school students juggling friends and studies and perhaps extracurriculur activities. Through high school history courses, like this AP^® European History course, and our college courses, we developed a fascination with history that propelled us into history as a career. Though most of you will not become professional historians, we hope this course and this book will spark or enhance an interest in history that will continue throughout your life. History can be experienced not just in classrooms but in everything around you — houses and the furniture in them, places of worship, public buildings, roads and the cars driving on them, photographs in albums or on your cell phone, family heirlooms, souvenirs from trips, and on and on. And the thinking skills you learn by studying history can be applied to everything as well, from your classes in other subjects to a job you might be doing now to the career you hope to have after you finish your education to your role as an active citizen.

Believe it or not, we first encountered this book when we were still students, using an earlier edition in our own college courses, so we approached it as you are now, as readers and consumers. The initial three authors, John McKay, Bennett Hill, and John Buckler, designed this text to infuse new life into the study of European history at a point when social history was dramatically changing the ways we understood the past. The original authors decided to write 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. As students, we enjoyed the book for its readable and relatable view of history, so we welcomed the chance to come aboard as authors. As such, we remain committed to the original authors’ vision, though we now have a broader definition of social history that brings the initial 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. Because of its emphasis on the ways people both lived and thought about their lives, A History of Western Society has always included a large amount of cultural history, ranging from important works of philosophy and literature to popular songs and stories. We have enhanced this material, so in the book’s pages you will find discussion of men’s and women’s actual experiences and the ways they reflected on these experiences to create meaning. All three of us regularly teach introductory history courses at the college level and thus bring insights from our classrooms to your text.

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Along with our words about the European past, you will also find the words of many others in this book, along with art and objects they created. Every chapter has written and visual primary sources that come from prominent and ordinary individuals with a diversity of perspectives, ranging from diaries, speeches, letters, poetry, and drama to artifacts, architecture, tomb inscriptions, and propaganda posters. Some of these stand alone in a feature we call Evaluating the Evidence, and sometimes they are grouped together in a feature we call Thinking Like a Historian. Whether alone or in a group, the primary sources always include a headnote providing you with information about the source and offer questions that will help you understand the source and connect it to the information in the rest of the chapter. These primary sources will provide you with firsthand encounters with people of the past along with the means and tools for building your historical thinking skills, including analysis of evidence, chronological reasoning, explaining causation, and evaluating context. The AP^® European History exam will measure both your knowledge of European history and your skill to analyze it, and this book, with these primary source features in particular, is designed to help you to develop both.

Historians analyze evidence, just as detectives do, but they also tell stories, and in this book there are lots of stories. The Individuals in Society biographical essays offer brief studies of individuals, both famous and obscure, or occasionally of groups, who sought to understand and shape their world, just as you do. These include Rose Bertin, the first celebrity fashion stylist who clothed Queen Marie Antoinette of France in the eighteenth century, and Theodore Herzl, the journalist and playwright who in the late nineteenth century called on the Jewish people to found an independent Jewish state and European rulers to support it. In the Living in the Past features, we use material objects and images to focus on relatively narrow aspects of social and cultural history in order to write compelling stories that show how life in the past was both similar to and different from our lives today. So we discuss topics such as the foods that came from the Americas, the coffeehouses of Paris, street demonstrations and protests, or modern streamlined design. We hope that through these features you will explore the deeper ramifications of things around you that you might otherwise not think much about, such as consumer goods or even the money in your pocket.

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We were once students ourselves, and as previously mentioned, we interact with students every day, so we know firsthand and take seriously the challenges you face in understanding, retaining, and mastering so much material that is often unfamiliar. We have tried to make the book student-centered, with focus questions at the beginning of each chapter keyed to the main chapter headings to provide guidance in grasping the most important topics. At the end of each chapter, we offer Make Connections questions that allow you to assess larger developments across chapters, again beefing up your historical thinking skills in evaluating change and continuity, making comparisons, and analyzing context and causation. At the very end of each chapter, Looking Back, Looking Ahead provides an interpretation of the chapter’s main developments, while introducing events that you will encounter in the chapters to come, so that you can begin to see history as an ongoing process of interrelated events, just as historians do.

AP^® European History, with this book that serves it, is a college-level course, and everything we have discussed so far is in the college edition. Recognizing your distinctive needs, however, we added a few special features in this edition. AP^® Historical Thinking Skills: A Primer (the first set of orange-bordered pages) takes you through the historical thinking skills in great detail, with exercises based on material in the book that will allow you to practice these skills. Just as learning to play a sport or an instrument involves practice and training, so does learning how to do history. The primer also includes suggestions for getting the most out of reading this book (or any nonfiction book, for that matter) and advice on how you can develop the writing skills necessary for not only the AP^® European History course and exam but also future AP^® and college courses. We suggest that you read this primer before you start the course and that you refer to it often. Some of what you find may not make much sense to you now, but it’s important that you encounter these terms and ideas early so that they will be very familiar to you by the time you are ready to take the exam.

In addition to the AP^® skills primer, we created introductions that segment the book’s twenty chapters into the four historical time periods of the AP^® European History course. Located immediately before Chapters 11, 15, 20, and 25, these introductions offer an overview of AP^® Key Concepts and Thematic Learning Objectives as presented here in this text. Here you will find specific page references to the various Key Concepts as well as key questions to ask yourself to ensure you understand the Thematic Learning Objectives. You might notice that sometimes page references align with more than one Key Concept and the key questions always blend more than one type of Thematic Learning Objective. This is to be expected. Every historian understands and organizes the past in somewhat different ways, which is what makes our discipline focus more on discussion and debate and less on lecture.

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Remember as you read that these pages are filled with our interpretations and analyses. You can and will have your own. Don’t be afraid to critically examine and question as you read. You are not doing this alone. Your teacher is your guide through this process, and your fellow students will give you opportunities for both collaboration and debate. Our hope is that this course is just the starting point and that you will begin to watch national and international news with greater understanding and critical thought. What you learn in this course will enhance your life today, if you let it. Good luck as you embark on this journey!

Sincerely,

CLARE HARU CROWSTON

MERRY WIESNER-HANKS

JOE PERRY