THE FIRST EDITION OF WAYS OF THE WORLD set out to present a coherent, comparative, and brief global narrative focused on the big pictures of world history. As the book’s author, I have been pleased—and not a little surprised—by its commercial success and immensely gratified that it has proven useful for conveying the rich perspective of world history to so many students. The original book and the subsequent docutext version—with chapter-based sets of written and visual primary sources—have been adopted by world history instructors at over 550 colleges and universities and are used in many high school AP world history courses as well. Ways of the World represents for me the satisfying culmination of a long involvement in world history classrooms in Ethiopia, New York, New Zealand, and California.

Feedback from instructors as well as from student readers suggests that they have appreciated the book’s narrative brevity, its thematic and comparative focus, its many pedagogical features, the clarity and accessibility of its writing, and its musing or reflective tone. Perhaps most appealing has been the integrated combination of textbook and sourcebook that offers instructors such a wide range of pedagogical possibilities at a very reasonable price. For students, it has provided a “laboratory” experience, enabling them to engage directly with the evidence of documents and images—in short to “do history” even as they are reading history.

Since the publication of the first edition, technology has continued to transform teaching and learning. This edition of the text includes of a number of electronic dimensions, including LearningCurve, an easy-to-assign adaptive learning tool that helps students rehearse the material in the narrative so they come to class better prepared. Students receive access to LearningCurve, described more fully below, when they purchase a new copy of the book.

What’s in a Title?

The title of a book should evoke something of its character and outlook. The main title Ways of the World is intended to suggest at least three dimensions of the text.

The first is diversity or variation, for the “ways of the world,” or the ways of being human in the world, have been many and constantly changing. This book seeks to embrace the experience of humankind in its vast diversity, while noticing the changing location of particular centers of innovation and wider influence.

Second, the title Ways of the World invokes major panoramas, patterns, or pathways in world history, as opposed to highly detailed narratives. Many world history instructors have found that students often feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of data that a course in global history can require of them. In the narrative sections of this book, the larger patterns or the “big pictures” of world history appear in the foreground on center stage, while the still plentiful details, data, and facts occupy the background, serving in supporting roles.

A third implication of the book’s title lies in a certain reflective or musing quality of Ways of the World, which appears especially in the Big Picture essays that introduce each part of the book and in a Reflections section at the end of each chapter. These features of the book offer many opportunities for contemplating larger questions. The Big Picture essay for Part Six, for example, asks whether the twentieth century deserves to be considered a separate period of world history. Chapter 4 explores how historians and religious believers sometimes rub each other the wrong way. Chapter 8 probes how and why human societies change. And Chapter 22 muses about the difficulties and the usefulness of studying the unfinished stories of recent history. None of these questions have clear or easy answers, but the opportunity to contemplate them is among the great gifts that the study of history offers to us all.

The subtitle of this book, A Brief Global History with Sources, refers to its docutext format. Following the narrative portion of each chapter are sets of primary written and visual sources. Each collection is organized around a particular theme, issue, or question that derives from the chapter narrative. As the title of these features suggests, they enable students to “consider the evidence” and thus begin to understand the craft of historians as well as their conclusions. All of them are thoroughly cross-referenced in the narrative, are furnished with brief headnotes that provide context for the sources, and are accompanied by a series of probing “Using the Evidence” questions appropriate for in-class discussion and writing assignments. These questions ask students to evaluate the evidence (and sometimes the lack of evidence) while considering the point of view of the author, the audience reading or viewing the sources, and the historical context in which the source was produced. Through this process, students can learn to craft historical arguments from the evidence and to hone their skills of historical interpretation and synthesis.

The Dilemma of World History: Inclusivity and Coherence

The great virtue of world history lies in its inclusiveness, for its subject matter is the human species itself. But that virtue is also the source of world history’s greatest difficulty—telling a coherent story. How can we meaningfully present the planet’s many and distinct peoples and their intersections with one another in the confines of a single book or a single term? What prevents that telling from bogging down in the endless detail of various civilizations or cultures, from losing the forest for the trees, from implying that history is just “one damned thing after another”?

Less Can Be More

From the beginning, Ways of the World set out to cope with this fundamental conundrum of world history—the tension between inclusion and coherence—in several ways. The first is the relative brevity of the narrative. This means leaving some things out or treating them more succinctly than some instructors might expect. But it also means that the textbook need not overwhelm students or dominate the course. It allows for more creativity by instructors in constructing their own world history courses, giving them the opportunity to mix and match text, sources and other materials in distinctive ways.

The Centrality of Context: Change, Comparison, Connection

A further aid to achieving coherence amid the fragmenting possibilities of inclusion lies in maintaining the centrality of context, for in world history, nothing stands alone. Those of us who practice world history as teachers or textbook authors are seldom specialists in the particulars of what we study and teach. Rather we are “specialists of the whole,” seeking to find the richest, most suggestive, and most meaningful contexts in which to embed those particulars. Our task, fundamentally, is to teach contextual thinking.

To aid in this task, Ways of the World repeatedly highlights three such contexts, what I call the “three Cs” of world history: change, comparison, and connection. The first “C” emphasizes large-scale change, both within and especially across major regions of the world. Examples include the peopling of the planet, the breakthrough to agriculture, the emergence of “civilization,” the rise of universal religions, the changing shape of the Islamic world, the linking of eastern and western hemispheres in the wake of Columbus’s voyages, the Industrial Revolution, the rise and fall of world communism, and the acceleration of globalization during the twentieth century.

The second “C” involves frequent comparison, a technique of integration through juxtaposition, bringing several regions or cultures into our field of vision at the same time. It encourages reflection both on the common elements of the human experience and on its many variations. Such comparisons are pervasive throughout the book, informing both the chapter narratives and many of the docutext features. We examine the difference, for example, between the Agricultural Revolution in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres; between the beginnings of Buddhism and the early history of Christianity and Islam; between patriarchy in Athens and in Sparta; between European and Asian empires of the early modern era; between the Chinese and the Japanese response to European intrusion; between the Russian and Chinese revolutions; and many more. Many of the primary source “Considering the Evidence” features are also broadly comparative or cross-cultural. For example, the documents feature for Chapter 3 asks students to consider the nature of political authority in Second Wave civilizations in Athens, Rome, China, and India. Likewise the visual sources feature for Chapter 15 uses art and architecture to examine various expression of Christianity in Reformation Europe, colonial Bolivia, seventeenth century China, and Mughal India.

The final “C” emphasizes connection, networks of communication and exchange that increasingly shaped the character of those societies that participated in them. For world historians, cross-cultural interaction becomes one of the major motors of historical transformation. Such connections are addressed in nearly every chapter narrative and many docutext features. Examples include the clash of the ancient Greeks and the Persians; the long-distance commercial networks that linked the Afro-Eurasian world; the numerous cross-cultural encounters spawned by the spread of Islam; the trans-hemispheric Columbian exchange of the early modern era; and the growth of a genuinely global economy.

Organizing World History: Chronology, Theme, and Region

Organizing a world history textbook or a world history course is, to put it mildly, a daunting task. How should we divide up the seamless stream of human experience into manageable and accessible pieces, while recognizing always that such divisions are artificial, arbitrary, and contested? Historians, of course, debate the issue endlessly. In structuring Ways of the World, I have drawn on my own sense of “what works” in the classroom, on a personal penchant for organizational clarity, and on established practice in the field. The outcome has been an effort to balance three principles of organization—chronology, theme, and region—in a flexible format that can accommodate a variety of teaching approaches and curricular strategies.

This book addresses the question of chronology by dividing world history into six major periods. Each of these six “parts” begins with a Big Picture essay that introduces the general patterns of a particular period and raises questions about the problems historians face in periodizing the human past.

Part One (to 500 B.C.E.) deals in two chapters with beginnings—of human migration and social construction from the Paleolithic era through the Agricultural Revolution and the development of the First Civilizations. Each chapter pursues important themes on a global scale, illustrating those themes with regional examples treated comparatively.

Part Two examines the millennium of second-wave civilizations (500 B.C.E. to 500 C.E.) and employs the thematic principle in exploring the major civilizations of Eurasia (Chinese, Indian, Persian, and Mediterranean), with separate chapters focusing on their empires (Chapter 3), religious and cultural traditions (Chapter 4), and social organization (Chapter 5). These Afro-Eurasian chapters are followed by a single chapter (Chapter 6) that examines regionally the second-wave era in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

Part Three, embracing the thousand years between 500 and 1500 C.E., reflects a mix of thematic and regional principles. Chapter 7 focuses topically on commercial networks, while Chapters 8, 9, and 10 deal regionally with the Chinese, Islamic, and Christian worlds respectively. Chapter 11 treats pastoral societies as a broad theme and the Mongols as the most dramatic illustration of their impact on the larger stage of world history. Chapter 12, which bridges the two volumes of the book, presents an around-the-world tour in the fifteenth century, which serves both to conclude Volume 1 and to open Volume 2.

Part Four considers the early modern era (1450–1750), and treats each of its three chapters thematically. Chapter 13 compares European and Asian empires; Chapter 14 lays out the major patterns of global commerce and their consequences; and Chapter 15 focuses on cultural patterns, including the globalization of Christianity and the rise of modern science.

Part Five takes up the era of maximum European influence in the world, from 1750 to 1914. It charts the emergence of distinctively modern societies, devoting separate chapters to the Atlantic revolutions (Chapter 16) and the Industrial Revolution (Chapter 17). Chapters 18 and 19 focus on the growing impact of those European societies on the rest of humankind—on the world of formal colonies and on the still independent states of Latin America, China, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan.

Part Six, which looks at the most recent century (1914–2012), is perhaps the most problematic for world historians, given the abundance of data and the absence of time to sort out what is fundamental and what is peripheral. Its four chapters explore themes of global significance. Chapter 20 focuses on the descent of Europe into war, depression, and the Holocaust, and the global outcomes of this collapse. Chapter 21 examines global communism—its birth in revolution, its efforts to create socialist societies, its role in the Cold War, and its abandonment by the end of the twentieth century. Chapter 22 turns the spotlight on the Afro-Asian-Latin American majority of the world’s population, describing their exit from formal colonial rule and their emergence on the world stage as the developing countries. Chapter 23 concludes this account of the human journey by assessing the economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions of what we know as globalization.

What’s New?

In preparing this second edition of Ways of the World, I have sought to build on the strengths of the first edition, guided by the wise counsel of many reviewers and users of the book. I am especially pleased that this second edition has grown not at all beyond the contours of the first, thus refuting an apparent law of nature that revised books increase substantially in size. To make room for new material I have made some judicious abbreviations. A revised Chapter 1, for example, incorporates both the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, which had separate chapters in the first edition.

These and other cuts have made possible the inclusion of much that is new. Latin America and Southeast Asia have been incorporated more fully into the narrative. Gender and environmental issues are treated far more extensively and integrated throughout the narrative more smoothly than before. The discussion of early Christianity now highlights its Asian and African dimensions alongside the more familiar Roman and European aspects, while the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic Revolutions are cast in a more global context.

An entirely new feature in Ways of the World, entitled “Portraits,” provides a short biographical sketch of an individual in each chapter. Readers will meet Paneb, a notorious criminal in ancient Egypt whose life contrasts with the better-known history that celebrates the triumphs of Egyptian civilization in Chapter 2; Cecilia Penifader, a fourteenth-century English peasant woman, whose story provides a window into the lives of ordinary rural people, in Chapter 10; Ayuba Diallo, a prominent West African Muslim who was transported into slavery in America and then traveled back to freedom and slave owning at home, in Chapter 14; and Etty Hillesum, an inspiring Dutch observer and victim of Nazi aggression and the Holocaust whose life stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in Chapter 20. These and many other portraits—some of prominent persons but most describing quite ordinary people—provide a glimpse into individual lives often obscured in the larger patterns of world history.

A number of the document and visual source features are also new in this edition. The new sources feature in Chapter 1 combines both oral tradition and visual sources to explore how scholars seek to recover history before writing. New visual source features include those of Chapter 8, focused on travel on the Silk Roads, and Chapter 12, illustrating the impact of Islam on the art of the European Renaissance. The new documents feature for Chapter 17 both celebrates and criticizes the emerging world of industrial Europe; that in Chapter 19 offers various prescriptions for changing China in the late nineteenth century; and Chapter 23’s documents feature offers a range of voices from global feminism during the twentieth century.

Promoting Active Learning

As all instructors know, students can often “do the assignment” or read the required chapter and yet have nearly no understanding of it when they come to class. The problem, frequently, is passive studying—a quick once-over, perhaps some highlighting of the text—but little sustained involvement with the material. A central pedagogical problem in all teaching is how to encourage more active, engaged styles of learning. We want to enable students to manipulate the information of the book, using its ideas and data to answer questions, to make comparisons, to draw conclusions, to criticize assumptions, and to infer implications that are not explicitly disclosed in the text itself.

Ways of the World seeks to promote active learning in at least four major ways. First, the book includes access to LearningCurve, online adaptive quizzing that promotes engaged reading and focused review. Cross-references at the end of every major section and chapter in the text prompt students to log in and rehearse their understanding of the material they have just read. Students move at their own pace and accumulate points as they go, giving the interaction a game-like feel. Feedback for incorrect responses explains why the answer is incorrect and directs students back to the text to review before they attempt to answer the question again. The end result is a better understanding of the key elements of the text.

A second active learning element involves motivation. A contemporary vignette opens each chapter with a story that links the past and the present to show the continuing resonance of the past in the lives of contemporary people. Chapter 6, for example, begins by describing the inauguration in 2010 of Bolivian President Evo Morales at an impressive ceremony at Tiwanaku, the center of an ancient Andean empire and emphasizing the continuing importance of this ancient civilization in Bolivian culture. At the end of each chapter, a short Reflections section raises provocative, sometimes quasi-philosophical, questions about the craft of the historian and the unfolding of the human story. Hopefully, these brief essays provide an incentive for our students’ own pondering and grist for the mill of vigorous class discussions.

A third technique for encouraging active learning lies in the provision of frequent contextual markers. Student readers need to know where they are going and where they have been. Thus part-opening Big Picture essays preview what follows in the subsequent chapters. A chapter outline opens each chapter, while a NEW Map of Time provides a chronological overview of major events and processes. In addition, a NEW Seeking the Main Point question helps students focus on the main theme of the chapter. Each chapter also has at least one NEW Summing Up So Far question that invites students to reflect on what they have learned to that point in the chapter. Snapshots appear in every chapter and present succinct glimpses of particular themes, regions, or time periods, adding some trees to the forest of world history. A list of terms at the end of each chapter invites students to check their grasp of the material. As usual with books published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, a rich illustration program enhances the narrative. And over 100 maps, many enriched or redrawn for this edition, provide beautifully rendered spatial context for the unfolding of history.

Finally, active learning means approaching the text with something to look for, rather than simply dutifully completing the assignment. Ways of the World provides such cues in abundance. A series of questions in the margins, labeled “change,” “comparison,” or “connection,” allows students to read the adjacent material with a clear purpose in mind. Big Picture Questions at the end of each chapter deal with matters not directly addressed in the text. Instead, they provide opportunities for integration, comparison, analysis, and sometimes speculation. Questions abound as well in the document and visual sources features, encouraging a careful reading of both texts and images, while providing points of departure for using those sources collectively. Working with these primary sources requires students to engage actively with the text.

“It Takes a Village”

In any enterprise of significance “it takes a village,” as they say. Bringing Ways of the World to life, it seems, has occupied the energies of several villages. Among the privileges and delights of writing and revising this book has been the opportunity to interact with my fellow villagers.

The largest of these communities consists of the people who read the first edition of the book and commented on it. I continue to be surprised at the power of this kind of collaboration, frequently finding that passages I had regarded as polished to a gleaming perfection benefited greatly from the collective wisdom and experience of these thoughtful reviewers. Many of them were commissioned by Bedford/St. Martin’s and are listed here in alphabetical order, with my great thanks: Maria S. Arbelaez, University of Nebraska-Omaha; Veronica L. Bale, Mira Costa College; Christopher Bellitto, Kean University; Monica Bord-Lamberty, Northwood High School; Ralph Croizier, University of Victoria; Edward Dandrow, University of Central Florida; Peter L. de Rosa, Bridgewater State University; Amy Forss, Metropolitan Community College; Denis Gainty, Georgia State University; Steven A. Glazer, Graceland University; Sue Gronewald, Kean University; Andrew Hamilton, Viterbo University; J. Laurence Hare, University of Arkansas; Michael Hinckley, Northern Kentucky University; Bram Hubbell, Friends Seminary; Ronald Huch, Eastern Kentucky University; Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University; Mark Lentz, University of Louisiana-Lafayette; Kate McGrath, Central Connecticut State University; C. Brid Nicholson, Kean University; Donna Patch, Westside High School; Jonathan T. Reynolds, Northern Kentucky University; James Sabathne, Hononegah High School; Christopher Sleeper, Mira Costa College; Ira Spar, Ramapo College and Metropolitan Museum of Art; Kristen Strobel, Lexington High School; Michael Vann, Sacramento State University; Peter Winn, Tufts University; and Judith Zinsser, Miami University of Ohio.

A special note of thanks to Eric Nelson of Missouri State University who has offered no end of useful suggestions while preparing the wonderful Instructor’s Resource Manual. Eric also provided content for the LearningCurve adaptive quizzes and for new special features in the x-Book for Ways of the World. I also extend a special thanks to Stanley Burstein, emeritus at California State University-Los Angeles who has been my wonderfully helpful mentor on all matters ancient. Contributors to the supplements also include Phyllis G. Jestice, University of Southern Mississippi; Lisa Tran, California State University-Fullerton; and Michael Vann, Sacramento State University.

The “Bedford village” has been a second community sustaining this enterprise and the one most directly responsible for the book’s second edition. It would be difficult for any author to imagine a more supportive and professional publishing team. My chief point of contact with the Bedford village has been Kathryn Abbott, the development editor who also guided much of the first edition. As an experienced professor of history herself, she has masterfully summarized and analyzed numerous reviews of the manuscript and has read and reread every word, perused every map, and examined every image with great care, offering both reassurance and useful criticism. She has brought to this delicate task the sensitivity of a fine historian, the skills of an outstanding editor, and a much appreciated understanding of the author’s sensibilities. Photo researcher Carole Frohlich identified and acquired the many images that grace Ways of the World and did so with efficiency and courtesy.

Others on the team have also exhibited that lovely combination of personal kindness and professional competence that is so characteristic of the Bedford way. Company president Denise Wydra, co-president of Macmillan Higher Education Joan Feinberg, and publisher Mary Dougherty have all kept an eye on the project amid many duties. More immediately responsible for the second edition was Traci Crowell, executive editor for history, and Jane Knetzger, director of development, who provided overall guidance as well as the necessary resources. Operating more behind the scenes in the Bedford village, a series of highly competent and always supportive people have shepherded this revised edition along its way. Associate editor Robin Soule and editorial assistant Emily DiPietro provided invaluable assistance in handling the manuscript, contacting reviewers, and keeping on top of the endless details that such an enterprise demands. Bridget Leahy has again served as production editor during the book’s production and, again, did so with both grace and efficiency. Copy editor Lisa Wehrle polished the prose and sorted out my inconsistent usages with a seasoned and perceptive eye. Jenna Bookin Barry and Katherine Bates have overseen the marketing process, while Bedford’s history specialists John Hunger and Sean Blest and a cadre of humanities specialists and sales representatives have reintroduced the book to the academic world. Jack Cashman supervised the development of ancillary materials to support the book, and Donna Dennison ably coordinated research for the lovely covers that mark Ways of the World.

Yet another “village” that contributed much to Ways of the World consists in that group of distinguished scholars and teachers who worked with me on an earlier world history text, The Making of the Modern World, published by St. Martin’s Press (1988, 1995). They include Sandria Freitag, Edwin Hirschmann, Donald Holsinger, James Horn, Robert Marks, Joe Moore, Lynn Parsons, and Robert Smith. That collective effort resembled participation in an extended seminar, from which I benefitted immensely. Their ideas and insights have shaped my own understanding of world history in many ways and greatly enriched Ways of the World.

A final and much smaller community sustained this project and its author. It is that most intimate of villages that we know as a marriage. Sharing that village with me is my wife, Suzanne Sturn. It is her work to bring ideas and people to life on stage, even as I try to do between these covers. She knows how I feel about her love and support, and no one else needs to.

To all of my fellow villagers, I offer deep thanks for an immensely rewarding experience. I am grateful beyond measure.

Robert Strayer

La Selva Beach, CA

Summer 2012