mckayworld10e

Preface: Why This Book This Way

The tenth edition of A History of World Societies continues to provide the social and cultural focus, comprehensive regional organization, and global perspective that have long been hallmarks of the book. All three of these qualities have been greatly enhanced by the addition of a new member to the author team, Jerry Dávila from the University of Illinois, who brings expertise in Latin America and the twentieth century. A renowned scholar of Brazil whose work focuses on race and social policy, Jerry offers a fresh perspective to our coverage of Latin America and to the final chapters in the book, which he has completely reconceptualized.

Not only do we thus continue to benefit from a collaborative team of regional experts with deep experience in the world history classroom, but we are also pleased to introduce a suite of digital tools designed to save you time and to help students gain confidence and learn historical thinking skills.

New Tools for the Digital Age

Because we know that your classroom needs are changing rapidly, we are excited to announce that A History of World Societiesis available with LaunchPad. Free when packaged with the book, LaunchPad’s course space and interactive e-book are ready to use as is (or can be edited and customized with your own material) and can be assigned right away. Developed with extensive feedback from history instructors and students, LaunchPad includes the complete narrative e-book, as well as abundant primary documents, maps, images, assignments, and activities. The aims of key learning outcomes are addressed via formative and summative assessments, short-answer and essay questions, multiple-choice quizzing, and LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool designed to get students to read before they come to class. Available with training and support, LaunchPad can help you take your teaching into a new era. To learn more about the benefits of LearningCurve and LaunchPad, see “Versions and Supplements” on page xv. In addition, the following sections will show you how specific skills-based features of A History of World Societies can be enhanced by the ability to assign and track student work in LaunchPad.

The Story of A History of World Societies

In this age of global connections, with their influence on the global economy, global migration patterns, popular culture, and global warming, among other aspects of life, the study of world history is more vital and urgent than ever before. An understanding of the broad sweep of the human past helps us comprehend today’s dramatic changes and enduring continuities. People now migrate enormous distances and establish new lives far from their places of birth, yet migration has been a constant in history since the first humans walked out of Africa. Satellites and cell phones now link nearly every inch of the planet, yet the expansion of communication networks is a process that is thousands of years old. Children who speak different languages at home now sit side by side in schools and learn from one another, yet intercultural encounters have long been a source of innovation, transformation, and at times, unfortunately, conflict.

This book is designed for twenty-first-century students who will spend their lives on this small interconnected planet and for whom an understanding of only local or national history will no longer be sufficient. We believe that the study of world history in a broad and comparative context is an exciting, important, and highly practical pursuit. It is our conviction, based on considerable experience in introducing large numbers of students to world history, that a book reflecting current trends in scholarship can excite readers and inspire an enduring interest in the long human experience.

Our strategy has been twofold. First, we have made social and cultural history the core elements of our narrative. We seek to re-create the lives of ordinary people in appealing human terms and also to highlight the interplay between men’s and women’s lived experiences and the ways they reflect on these to create meaning. Thus, in addition to foundational works of philosophy and literature, we include popular songs and stories. We present objects along with texts as important sources for studying history, and this has allowed us to incorporate the growing emphasis on material culture in the work of many historians. At the same time, we have been mindful of the need to give great economic, political, and intellectual developments the attention they deserve. We want to give individual students and instructors an integrated perspective so that they can pursue — on their own or in the classroom — the themes and questions that they find particularly exciting and significant.

Second, we have made every effort to strike an effective global and regional balance. The whole world interacts today, and to understand the interactions and what they mean for today’s citizens, we must study the whole world’s history. Thus we have adopted a comprehensive regional organization with a global perspective that is clear and manageable for students. For example, Chapter 7 introduces students in depth to East Asia, and at the same time the chapter highlights the cultural connections that occurred via the Silk Road and the spread of Buddhism. We study all geographical areas, conscious of the separate histories of many parts of the world, particularly in the earliest millennia of human development. We also stress the links among cultures, political units, and economic systems, for these connections have made the world what it is today. We make comparisons and connections across time as well as space, for understanding the unfolding of the human story in time is the central task of history.

Primary Sources for Teaching Critical Thinking and Analysis

A History of World Societies offers an extensive program of primary source assignments to help students master a number of key learning outcomes, among them critical thinking, historical thinking, analytical thinking, and argumentation, as well as learning about the diversity of world cultures. When assigned in LaunchPad, all primary source features are accompanied by multiple-choice quizzes that help you ensure students come to class prepared.

For the tenth edition, we have augmented our Viewpoints primary source feature to highlight the diversity of the world’s people in response to reviewers’ enthusiastic endorsement of this feature. The new edition offers in each chapter two sets of paired primary documents on a topic that illuminates the human experience, allowing us to provide more concrete examples of differences in the ways people thought. Anyone teaching world history has to emphasize larger trends and developments, but students sometimes get the wrong impression that everyone in a society thought alike. We hope that teachers can use these passages to get students thinking about diversity within and across societies. The 66 Viewpoints assignments — two in each chapter — introduce students to working with sources, encourage critical analysis, and extend the narrative while giving voice to the people of the past. Each includes a brief introduction and questions for analysis, and in LaunchPad they are also accompanied by multiple-choice questions. Carefully chosen for accessibility, each pair of documents presents views on a diverse range of topics. NEW Viewpoints topics include “Addressing the Gods in Mesopotamia and Egypt”; “The Inglorious Side of War in the Book of Songs and the Patirruppattu”; “Hellenistic and Chinese Spells”; “Freeing Slaves in Justinian’s Code and the Qur’an”; early Chinese and Portuguese accounts of Africa; Protestant and Neo-Confucian ideas on behavior; “Jahangir and Louis XIV on Priorities for Monarchs”; “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s Nature and Education”; perspectives on Indian cotton manufacturing in India and Britain; “African Views of the Scramble for Africa”; the abolition of slavery in the Americas; and women activists in Mexico.

Each chapter also continues to include a longer primary source feature titled Listening to the Past, chosen to extend and illuminate a major historical issue considered in each chapter. The feature presents a single original source or several voices on the subject to help instructors teach the important skills of critical thinking and analysis. Each opens with an introduction and closes with questions for analysis that invite students to evaluate the evidence as historians would, and again, in LaunchPad, multiple-choice questions are provided. Selected for their interest and significance and carefully placed within their historical context, these sources, we hope, allow students to “hear the past” and to observe how history has been shaped by individuals. NEW topics include “The Teachings of Confucius”; “Gregory of Tours on the Veneration of Relics”; “Courtly Love Poetry”; “Stefan Zweig on Middle-Class Youth and Sexuality” (in early-twentieth-century Europe); “Reyita Castillo Bueno on Slavery and Freedom in Cuba”; “C. L. R. James on Pan-African Liberation”; and lyrics from a Brazilian band on globalization.

In addition to using documents as part of our special feature program, we have quoted extensively from a wide variety of primary sources within the narrative, demonstrating in our use of these quotations that they are the “stuff ” of history. Thus primary sources appear as an integral part of the narrative as well as in extended form in the Listening to the Past and expanded Viewpoints chapter features.

New assignable Document Projects in LaunchPad offer students more practice in interpreting primary sources. Each project, based on the Individuals in Society feature described in the next section, prompts students to explore a key question through analysis of multiple sources. Chapter 22’s project, for example, asks students to analyze documents on the complexities of the Haitian Revolution and the conditions that made Toussaint L’Ouverture’s story possible. Auto-graded multiple-choice questions based on the documents help students analyze the sources.

Finally, we have revised our primary source documents collection, Sources for World Societies, to add more visual sources and to closely align the readings with the chapter topics and themes of the tenth edition. 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 our years of teaching world history, we have often noted that students come alive when they encounter stories about real people in the past. To give students a chance to see the past through ordinary people’s lives, each chapter includes one of the popular Individuals in Society biographical essays, each of which offers a brief study of an individual or group, informing students about the societies in which the individuals lived. This feature grew out of our long-standing focus on people’s lives and the varieties of historical experience, and we believe that readers will empathize with these human beings who themselves were seeking 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.” As described previously, in LaunchPad, this feature includes an associated Document Project. NEW features include essays on Sudatta, a lay follower of the Buddha; Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici; Malintzin; and Sieng, a Mnong refugee living in the United States.

Connecting History to Real-World Applications

Back again are the popular Global Trade features, essays that focus on a particular commodity, exploring the world trade, social and economic impact, and cultural influence of that commodity. Each essay is accompanied by a detailed map showing the trade routes of the commodity. We believe that careful attention to all these essays will enable students to appreciate the complex ways in which trade has connected and influenced various parts of the world. All the Global Trade features are fully assignable and assessable in LaunchPad.

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 a 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, these activities are assignable and students can submit their work. Throughout the textbook and online in LaunchPad, more than 100 full-size maps illustrate major developments in the chapters. In addition, 82 spot maps are embedded in the narrative to show specific areas under discussion.

Chronological Reasoning

To help students make comparisons, understand changes over time, and see relationships among contemporaneous events, each chapter ends with a chapter chronologythat reviews major developments discussed in the chapter. A unified timeline at the end of the text, and available from every page in LaunchPad, allows students to compare developments over the centuries.

Active Reading

With the goal of making this the most student-centered edition yet, we paid renewed attention to the book’s reading and study aids:

Focus questions at the start of each main heading help guide students in their reading. These questions are repeated in the chapter review section.
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.
The chapter-closingConnectionsfeature synthesizes main developments and makes connections and comparisons between countries and regions to explain how events relate to larger global processes, such as the influence of the Silk Road, the effects of the transatlantic slave trade, and the ramifications of colonialism.
A NEW Chapter Summary reinforces key chapter events and ideas for students.
Review and Explore at the end of each chapter includes a list of key terms, chapter focus questions, and NEW Make Connections questions that prompt students to assess larger developments across chapters.
Key terms are bolded in the text, defined in the margin, and listed in the chapter review to promote clarity and comprehension, and phonetic spellings are located directly after terms that readers are likely to find hard to pronounce.

All our changes to the book, large and small, are intended to give students and instructors an integrated perspective so that they can pursue — on their own or in the classroom — the historical questions that they find particularly exciting and significant.

Organizational and Textual Changes

To meet the demands of the evolving course, we have made several major changes in the organization of chapters to reflect the way the course is taught today. The most dramatic changes are the reordering of Chapter 17: The Islamic World Powers, 1300–1800 (formerly Chapter 20) and a complete overhaul of the final section of the book covering the postwar era. This new placement for our coverage of Islam reflects a growing interest among instructors and students in the Islamic world and highlights early Islamic cultural contributions.

To address the concerns of instructors who teach from the second volume of the text, we have added a new section on the Reformation to Chapter 18 so that students whose courses begin with Chapters 15 or 16 will now receive that coverage in Volume 2. The new section includes the Protestant and Catholic Reformations as well as religious violence and witch-hunts.

In its examination of the age of revolution in the Atlantic world, Chapter 22 now incorporates revolutions in Latin America. In order to provide a more global perspective on European politics, culture, and economics in the early modern period, Chapter 23 on the Industrial Revolution considers industrialization more broadly as a global phenomenon with a new section titled “The Global Picture.” Together, the enhanced global perspectives of these chapters help connect the different regions of the globe and, in particular, help explain the crucial period when Europe began to dominate the rest of the globe.

The final section of the text, covering the post-1945 period, has also been completely reworked. In addition to updating all the postwar chapters through 2014, Jerry Dávila substantially rewrote the last four chapters and streamlined them into three, creating a more tightly focused and accessible section that now divides the period chronologically as follows: Chapter 31: Decolonization, Revolution, and the Cold War, 1945–1968; Chapter 32: Liberalization, 1968–2000s; Chapter 33: The Contemporary World in Historical Perspective. The last three chapters are now organized around two dominant themes of the postwar world: liberation movements that challenged power structures such as colonialism and racial supremacism; and the spread of liberalization that characterized the end of the Cold War in particular, marking the rise of free markets and liberal political systems. The final chapter examines the significance of social movements in shaping a contemporary world that continues to struggle with historic conflicts and inequalities.

In terms of specific textual changes, we have worked hard to keep the book up-to-date and to strengthen our comprehensive, comparative, and connective approach. Moreover, we revised every chapter with the goal of readability and accessibility. Highlights of the new edition include:

Chapter 1 includes new information on the recent archaeological find at Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey that suggests that cultural factors may have played a role in the development of agriculture.
Chapter 2 has new coverage on Egyptian society and a discussion of gender distinctions in Sumerian society.
In Chapter 6, the section on the founding of Rome has been completely rewritten.
Chapter 8 contains a new section on Christian missionaries and conversion, and it explains the process of the Christianization of barbarian Europe.
Chapter 11 now centers on the ways in which systems of religious belief shaped ancient societies of the Americas and provided tools people used to understand and adapt to their world. It also looks at the role of sources produced after the European encounter in shaping our understanding of the histories of indigenous American empires.
An expanded discussion of witchcraft in Chapter 15 now includes practices of indigenous peoples in the New World.
Chapter 18 has enhanced coverage of Russian imperial expansion as well as a new section called “People Beyond Borders” that includes piracy and gives students a feeling for the ways in which imperial borders were often more real on the map than in real life.
In Chapter 19, a new section called “The Early Enlightenment” clarifies the mixture of religious, political, and scientific thought that characterized the early period of the Enlightenment.
Chapter 22 emphasizes the indigenous origins of the Haitian revolution by highlighting the African backgrounds of slaves and the considerable military experience many of them had, which helps explain how they could defeat the French and British.
Chapter 23 has been heavily revised to reflect new scholarship on industrialization and to provide a broader, more comparative perspective.
A new section in Chapter 24 on social and economic conflict connects the industrialization of continental Europe with the political coverage of the revolutions of 1848.
Chapter 27 now focuses on the Americas within the framework of liberalism and examines connections between the experiences of settlement, state formation, and economic integration in the United States and Latin America.
Chapter 29 contains more detail on the reforms of Amanullah Khan in the section on the modernization of Afghanistan.
As noted previously, the final three chapters of the book have been entirely rewritten by new author Jerry Dávila.

In sum, we have tried to bring new research and interpretation into our global history because our goal is to keep our book stimulating, accurate, and current for students and instructors.