[Ebook PDF] Ways of the World with Sources, Volume 1: A Brief Global History, 4th Edition

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Ways of the World with Sources, Volume 1: A Brief Global History, 4th Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1319109752
ISBN-10: 1319109756

Author: Robert Strayer (Author), Eric Nelson (Author)

Ways of the World is one of the most successful and innovative textbooks for world history. This 2-in-1 textbook and reader includes a brief-by-design narrative that focuses on significant historical developments and broad themes in world history. With keen consideration of the needs of their student audience, authors Robert W. Strayer and Eric W. Nelson provide an insightful, big picture synthesis that helps students discern what matters most in world history – patterns and variations on both global and regional levels and continuity and change over time. With the same personal touch, the authors guide students to consider primary and secondary source evidence the way historians do.

Available for free when packaged with the print book, the popular digital assignment options for this text bring skill building and assessment to a highly effective level. The active learning options come in Launchpad, which combines an accessible e-book with Learning Curve, an adaptive and automatically graded learning tool that — when assigned — helps ensure students read the book; the complete companion reader with Thinking through Sources digital exercises that help students build arguments from those sources; and many other study and assessment tools. For instructors who want the easiest and most affordable way to ensure students come to class prepared, Achieve Read & Practice pairs Learning Curve adaptive quizzing and our mobile, accessible Value Edition e-book, in one easy-to-use product.

Preface
Preface
About Ways of the World
Ways of the World is an intentionally brief global history of the human experience that focuses on the big pictures of world history, using examples selectively rather than cluttering the narrative with endless details. It repeatedly highlights issues of change, of comparison, and of connection among culturally different peoples, both in the narrative text and in the book’s innovative primary and secondary source features.
The main title of the book, Ways of the World, evokes three dimensions of its distinctive character and outlook, all of them based on our experience as teachers and scholars. 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 global experience of humankind, both in its common features and 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 rather than a highly detailed narrative, which can often overwhelm students. Thus, most chapters are organized in terms of broad global or transregional themes, illustrated by a limited number of specific examples.

A third implication of the book’s title lies in a certain reflective quality that appears in the Big Picture essays that introduce each Part, in the Reflections section at the end of each chapter, and periodically in the narrative itself. This dimension of the book offers many opportunities for pondering larger questions about how historians operate, about the dilemmas they face in reconstructing the human journey, and
about the relationship of the past to the present.
These elements of Ways of the World find expression repeatedly in what we call the four Cs of world history: context, change, comparison, and connection. The first “C,” context, refers to the larger frameworks within which particular historical figures, events, societies, and civilizations take shape.
In our telling of the human past, context is central, for in world history nothing stands alone. Like Russian nesting dolls, every story finds a place in some more inclusive narrative. European empires in the Americas, for example, take on new meaning when they are understood as part of a global process of imperial expansion that included the growth of the Inca, Russian, Chinese, and Ottoman empires at the same time.
The second “C,” large-scale change, both within and especially across major regions of the world, represents another prominent emphasis in Ways of the World. Examples include the peopling of the planet, the emergence of “civilization,” the linking of Eastern and Western hemispheres in the wake of Columbus’s voyages, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant changes during the course of human history. The flip side of change, of course, is continuity, implying a focus on what persists over long periods of time. And so Ways of the World seeks to juxtapose these contrasting elements of human
experience. While civilizations have changed dramatically over time, some of their essential features — cities, states, patriarchy, and class inequality, for example — have long endured.
A third “C” involves frequent comparison, bringing several regions or cultures into our field of vision at the same time. It means constantly asking “what’s the difference?” Thus this book makes comparisons between the Agricultural Revolution in the Eastern and Western hemispheres; between the beginnings of Buddhism and the early history of Christianity and Islam; between the Russian and Chinese revolutions; and between feminism in the Global North and the Global South. These and many more comparisons frequently punctuate our account of the global past.
The final “C” emphasizes connections, networks of communication and exchange that increasingly shaped the character of the societies that participated in them. In our account of the human story, world history is less about what happened within particular civilizations or cultures than about the processes and outcomes of their meetings with one another.
Cross-cultural encounters then become one of the major motors of historical transformation. 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 interactions spawned by the spread of Islam; the trans-hemispheric Columbian exchange of the early modern era; and the more recent growth of a thoroughly entangled global economy.