Understanding World Societies 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 world history 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 World Societies addresses all of these concerns.

The second edition of Understanding 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 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 Understanding World Societies is available with LaunchPad. Free when packaged with the book, or heavily discounted as a stand-alone product, LaunchPad’s course space and interactive e-book is ready to use as is or can be edited and customized with your own material and 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 assessment, 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 the “Versions and Supplements” section on page xxiii and see below on how specific skills-based features of Understanding World Societies benefit from the ability to assign and track student work in LaunchPad.

Understanding World Societies: Bringing the Past to Life for Students

In this age of global connections, with its influence on the global economy, global migration patterns, popular culture, and global warming, among other things, 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. Satellite 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.

An Inquiry-Based Model Designed for Understanding

By employing innovative pedagogy, we believe that Understanding World Societies 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 the unique pedagogical features of Understanding World Societies 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 fully realize their understanding of the chapter. 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

Understanding 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, argumentation, and 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 that students come to class prepared.

New assignable Online Document Projects in LaunchPad offer students more practice in interpreting primary sources. Each project, based on the Individuals in Society feature described below, prompts students to explore a key question through analysis of multiple sources. Chapter 22, 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 second 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 a 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 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. 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.

Geographical 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 92 full-size maps illustrate major developments in the chapter. In addition, 74 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 World Societies 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 fully assimilate the text 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.

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 of the postwar chapters through 2014, Jerry Dávila substantially rewrote and streamlined the last four chapters into three to create 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:

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