Book Description
KEY BENEFIT: A true exploration of world history, this book links chronology, themes, and geography in eight units, or parts of study, each emphasizes a single theme–origins, cities, empires, religion, trade, migrations, revolutions, and technology.
KEY TOPICS: As in the first two editions, this book focuses throughout on three major questions–What do we know? How do we know it? What difference does it make?–but the organization has changed, giving each feature a clearer place. Rich in primary sources–both written and visual–and in data and interpretation, it addresses how historians form, debate, and revise our historical understanding of the world, shows the value of other disciplines in understanding history, and helps readers begin to assess their own place in the ongoing history of the world.
MARKET: A great resource for the professional historian.
Book Description
This comprehensive, accessible survey of world history has been extensively revised to provide an even more global and comparative perspective on the events and processes that have shaped our increasingly interdependent world. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields.
Interactive maps—one Web-based interactive map in each chapter—provides readers with opportunities to explore the relationships between time and space in shaping world history.
Volume 1 covers the period to 1700. The Sixth edition now provides roughly the same amount of coverage for European and non-European regions. Combines unusually strong and thorough coverage of the unique heritage of Asian, African, Islamic, Western, and American civilizations, while highlighting the role of the world's great religious and philosophical traditions. For anyone interested in world civilization or world history.
Book Description
This book inaugurates a major three-volume history of the family in Europe over the past five hundred years. In the series, eminent European and American social historians present a fresh reading of family life in Europe, explaining how families and family relations differed across Europe and how and why they changed over time. This volume deals with family life in Europe--and the institutional, economic, political, and cultural forces that transformed it--from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Chapters consider, for example, the family's housing, diet, and domestic organization; the nature of family law; the impact of religious change; demographic factors such as disease and childhood mortality; relations between parents and children; and the effect of changing trends in marriage, divorce, and extended kin relationships. Using research techniques from the social sciences as well as new insights from cultural and gender history and the history of sexuality, the contributors present a vivid picture of family life in early modern times that will forever change our image of that era.
Book Description
The Gesta Normannorum Ducum is one of the most important sources for the history of Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and contains the earliest prose account of the Norman Conquest. It was written by a succession of authors, the first of whom was William of Jumieges, who wrote for William the Conqueror. Later writers, such as Orderic Vitalis (d. c.1142) and Robert of Torigni (d. 1186), interpolated and extended the chronicle as far as King Henry I (1100-1135). The later accretions reveal much not only about changing attitudes towards the Norman invasion of England, but also about views of the early Viking foundation of Normandy. Elisabeth van Houts's two-volume edition is based on a study of all forty-seven extant manuscripts of the Gesta, including the earliest surviving copy of c. 1100, hitherto unknown. The full original text of William of Jumieges is supplied, as well as the integral text of the subsequent revisions and additions. Volume I contains Dr van Houts's introduction to the whole work, together with the text and translation of books i-iv. Books v-viii will appear in Volume II. The edition forms an important contribution to our understanding of Anglo-Norman politics.
Average customer rating:
- Comprehensive study -- but not full text
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William of Malmesbury: Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings Volume 1 (Oxford Medieval Texts)
R. A. B. Mynors ,
R. M. Thomson , and
M. Winterbottom
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 019820678X |
Book Description
William of Malmesbury's Regesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English Kings) is one of the great histories of England, and one of the most important historical works of the European Middle Ages. Although its focus is national, its scope encompasses most of Western Europe and beyond, providing a full-scale account of the First Crusade. Apart from its formidable learning, it is characterized by narrative skill and entertainment value - with topics including unpowered flight and Henry I's zoo. This edition in the Oxford Medieval Texts series is the first modern translation and edition. A full historical introduction is supplied in Volume II.
Customer Reviews:
Comprehensive study -- but not full text.......2002-05-10
Any medievalist will undoubtedly find William of Malmesbury's Gesta cited throughout the footnotes of other studies. This volume provides a comprehensive commentary and analysis of the Malmesbury manuscripts, equal in every respect to the high standard expected from Oxford Medieval Texts.
Be forwarned, however, that this volume contains only the commentary. Those interested in reading the excellent full-text English translation, or making their own interpretation from the Latin will require the companion Volume I, which for some reason, Amazon does not include in its catalogue listings.
Customer Reviews:
How History Should be Written.......2005-07-30
Trial By Battle is a magnificent achievement. Though daunting to look at, the 600+ page narrative sweeps by with the excitement and suspense of a great novel. Sumption fails to give any real background details (the marriage of a king will be mentioned in passing without so much as a clue as to his wife's name!). We learn nothing of castle construction, arms and armour, architecture, geography, or anything else of the spectacle of life in 14th century Europe. But the step-by-step analysis of the intricacies of medieval politics more than compensates, throwing the reader headlong into the meeting rooms of the royal courts. The narrative, for all its complexity, never ceases to be anything but fascinating. The reader is able to see all the seemingly small and random details, the mistakes and misunderstandings and mistimings, and how they build to create a situation in which all out war is the only option.
Trial by Battle isn't simply the best book I've read about The 100 Years War, but the best I've read about the challenges faced by the medieval politician, and the strategic maneuvering required to achieve an acceptable outcome. Brilliant.
A Sterling Effort: I Bought Vol. II.......2002-05-08
Sumption's history of this sordid and bloody conflict will be the defining opus of this era. In this first volume of 600 pages he covers intimately all aspects of the war's first 10 years. He is mostly skilled at both the economic and diplomatic machinations of the conflict, emphasising how armies were fielded and then supported.
His scope is grand and he covers events as far away as Scotland, Flanders, Britany, and the Popes involvement from the Avignon palaces.
His strategic interpretation is superb, without equal. He has an ability to get into the head of participants and show their ultimate motivation in fighting. Why particular courses were decided upon are also fittingly reviewed; why a campaign in Flanders? Why get involved in Britany? How did England ultimately expand and prevail in Aquitaine when their foothold was so tenuous? Why were the French completely unable to exploint a fundamental postion of strength by working with their internal lines of communication? All of these questions are answered in good detail.
There are no real weaknesses in this work but there are a few things that readers should be prepared for:
1) Sumption is not writing a biography of any of the characters and although we understand a lot of their emotions in the heat of dimplomacy and battle, we hear little about the individual idiosyncracies of both Edward III and Philip VI. We learn almost nothing about their respective sons in this volume, which is amazing considering the future role they played.
2) Although this is a story of battle and slaughter, we are largely spared the details of the minutea of battle, who fought whom, the real intricacies of the weapons involved and the fate of those who were turned to bones. Sumption leaves that to other military historians who have written hundreds of pages on individual battles. There are however amazing revalations here about Crecy which deserve to be noted; Sumption notes that the repeat regrouping and charging of the English lines was not characterisitic of a disorganised French attack. As such this contracdicts the traditional version of the French falling over themselves in the battle. In the end the longbow won the battle. No new surpises here.
3) There is little actual focus on how the war effected the peasant. Perhaps because we know so little of them, but Sumption's research is so exhaustive that he purposefully concentrates on the diplomatic, military alliance structures and their respective figures.
This was a major project to get through. I had to admit that times I did wander in my attention span. But the detail in the text is rich and his coverage of the impact of the war in Britany and the northern English Marches against the Scots, is something largely ignored by other historians of this war.
I have already bought volume II and determined read all future volumes as he finishes.... although at this rate it will be a total of at least 10 volumes to get throught this particularly depressing interval in human history.
Readable, knowledgeable and intelligent history.......2000-09-19
The Middle Ages in Europe, a time of poor sanitation and brutal men terrifying local communities into submission; where the rule of law may have been as tenuous as the mortality people might expect to achieve. The Middle Ages in Europe is as near as one might get to the post apocalyptic nightmare depicted in the movie Mad Max 2 the Road Warrior where decisions are terrible and give very short shrift to our political correct world of today. This is the world Jonathan Sumption evokes in his Trial by Battle. It's a time of shortages of food and resources, the golden age of the plentiful thirteenth century is drawing to a close and the economy of Europe is coming under strain. Thrust into this crisis are the rulers of the lands of those times. Principally the Kings of England and France. But theres a host of other lesser nobles, of Dukes, Earls and Counts in north west Europe effected and effecting the politics of the times. In this book, Mr. Sumption gives a crash course in the organisation of the various kingdoms, principalities, counties and dukedoms as they become involved in the story of the Hundred Years War. Its not necessary to know in depth about the running of a kingdom though it might help to have a little background knowledge. The pace of the book carries this history at a good rate of knots. My only criticism is while Mr Sumption produces a suitable statistic here and there to back up the picture he paints in words, there can be a lack of colour, the description of an event or cultural or technological details, is lacking in places. This left me at a loss for an image to anchor my understanding (after all I am a product of an age addicted to visualisation), That said it is only a small detraction from a really interesting work. The battle descriptions are spot on and the developments in between give the theme a sense of continuity. This volume brings the history from the origins of the war to ten years into its execution. You'll have to buy the next volume (which I did) to find out what happens but Trial by Battle is good in itself if you like the at times bizarrely mystical and nonsensical Middle Ages and at times utterly no nonsense people of those hard times
Sumption makes it work..........2000-09-08
Reading about the Middle Ages is like treading upstream sometimes. Its so easy to get bogged down and lose your path and eventually your interest. A lot of times reading history is exactly like that.
This book is very good at keeping the story of this period on its path and is extremely, even remarkably, readable. I actually managed to get wrapped up in the story (which I've read many times already) the way one does with good novels. The author is obviously very familiar with the primary sources but he quotes from them with care and only when his point is well-made. Otherwise he tells the story in clear, simple language - amazing for any of us who study or write history! And he has a fine sense of when the chroniclers were playing to their audience's prejudices and when they probably were right on point. Its difficult to read about the early period of the wars between England and France without getting mired in the problems the various powers faced -- and continued to toil over every year -- like constant bankruptcy, local rebellion, personality disorders and prejudices, and so forth. The author gives you these things -- the Middle Ages would not be the Middle Ages without them -- but in the right doses to make the fuller picture clear, not lose it in the haze.
I have not yet read the sequel but I'm confident it is as well written. I would recommend these volumes to anyone interested in the Middle Ages period in Europe.
Customer Reviews:
A good companion piece.......2003-02-15
At times enlightening, the first volume of Meinig's "Shaping of America" series is a worthy companion to American history books about the same topic. As a geographer, Meinig's concern isn't so much the history of the United States--in fact, he assumes that the reader already knows quite a bit about the topic. Rather, he is attempting to understand and represent why the Americas--specifically North America--became the continent it did, with the cultural characteristics it has. As such, models of cultural interaction are key.
Meinig's presentation is a bit grand--he could have used a more effective editor. Run-on sentences and grand adjectives pepper the text, and the organization (especially in the first section) could have been clearer. Still, this is a very important book in a very important series, because it provides a geographical perspective--one that previously had been ignored--on American history. As such, it makes a good companion to traditional histories of the North American continent.
Book Description
Originally published in two volumes, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent parallels with the Internet.......2005-02-23
No, Dr. E did not write in this book about the Internet at all but at least in pages 65-110, you can see the parallels. There is plenty here to chew on and yes, having both volumes together is a whopper but this is at the bare minimum a TOP 10 book for everyone in the Western world because it gets right to the heart of this reality we call "economics".
Excellent history and philosophy reading when you look at it from the right angle. It ranks up there with Drahos - Philosophy of IP, Kuhn's, Sorensen's thought experiments, Thoreau's selected journals, Dewey's how we think and Einstein's ideas and opinions.
Mind-blowing, but a tough slog for lay readers.......2001-08-23
This was a great book! It gave me a real appreciation for how foreign the medieval way of thought is from current -- because of the printing press. If you've read Walter Ong's _Orality and Literacy_, this is similarly mind-blowing.
I will caution, however, that this is a very academic book. She spends a fair amount of time refuting people who disagreed with her. It is also designed for historians. I'm no dummy, but some stuff went over my head. (If you know the following phrases and people, you'll be fine: Plutarch, incunabula, Tridentine, Rabelais, Marlowe, the _Digest_, Cujas.)
I gave it five stars because it was definitely worth slogging through, but I wish I had gotten the abridged version instead.
A superb introduction to the effect the printing press has h.......1998-03-08
We have come to forget that the introduction of the printing press by Gutenberg mattered, or we have come to assume that it directly led to the Protestant Reformation. Eisenstein wondered how true that was, and what other changes the press wrought in European society in the couple of hundred years after the press was introduced. Start with the concept of authorship--once books could be reproduced in quantity, authorship mattered. Then consider the question of alphabetization and indexing. Then think of what happens when travel writers describe native dress--people start believing the books and variations become more extreme to meet the printed word. That's just the beginning. Eisenstein's book is not just an incredible work, well written, about the effect on our culture of the printing press. It is also the sort of book that makes one realize how unimaginable and vast the influence of any invention can have on a society. This book is critical for media studies, history, printing, typography, just to better understand our own society, or for the pleasure of a good, thorough, read.
Great analysis of how technology can transform a culture.......1997-11-28
If you suspect that the Internet is changing our world in profound ways, this book will stir insights into how technology can rapidly transform nearly every aspect of a culture. Unlike most commentators on the Renaissance, who take for granted the fact that printing brought about great change, Eisenstein focuses on *how* technology triggered and accelerated dramatic change. She focuses especially on the role of exposure to new points of view.
For example, collaboration of printers, scholars and publishers in the first great publishing house, the Aldine Press, brought together people who previously had little knowledge of one anothers' world-views. In order to work together effectively, they were forced to see through one anothers' eyes. Indirect access to new viewpoints had an even broader impact. The ready availability of books allowed a genius such as Copernicus to study cosmology without devoting years of his life as a mendicant scholar. Eisenstein observes that the the movements of stars and planets hadn't changed; the newly available data were the opinions of previous cosmologists. For the first time in history, one could compare and contrast cosmologies in one's spare time, without sacrificing years to visit scattered libraries.
Although Eisenstein makes no attempt to compare early modern Europe with today's world, a reader who is familiar with today's technological changes can hardly help but draw parallels. Gutenberg, the technical purist who was repeatedly sued for refusing to ship his product, acted out the role of the prototypical Silicon Valley inventor suffering from "creeping elegance." Gutenberg's typography has rarely been equalled, but he died bankrupt, his invention owned by the "venture capitalists" who funded him. Meanwhile, Aldus Manutius persuaded compromise among printers (technologists) and church scholars (the publishing establishment). The Aldine Press expertly packaged information into books and catalogs that were easy to sell. Like Microsoft, the Aldine Press became a dramatic business success by delivering excellence in packaging of others' inventions, not by making technical breakthroughs.
Although Eisenstein does not focus greatly on the seat of power in early modern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, the church clearly suffered the greatest losses of influence as a result of the distribution of new ideas. Eisenstein recalls the protests of Martin Luther to the Pope, saying that he had no idea how so many people obtained his theses so quickly. The Wittenberg Door appears as an early Web site, allowing anyone, including publishers, to seize ideas that previous could not have achieved wide distribution. Eisenstein's readers will surely wonder which institutions in today's world stand to lose influence and power as a result of easy access to a variety of points of view via the Internet.
Book Description
An exciting new era of study of ancient Egypt is unfolding. You are introduced to a long-lost, sophisticated technology-now recovered and being further studied by highly credentialed scientists using the most advanced methods. This landmark, highly readable book shakes conventional ideas of pyramid construction to their roots. It presents baffling, unexplained masonry and engineering features requiring a new approach.
Customer Reviews:
Looking for answers, found more questions.......2005-03-25
I rate this book a 2, because I am frustrated. I bought this book online hoping to find some answers to teach my class. However, all I found were better articulated questions and more questions. So if you want to see, in written form, every possible question relating to the pyramids, this book is for you. THERE ARE NO ANSWERS IN THIS BOOK. Furthermore, I think there needs to be a big disclaimer explaining that this book is just one grand, expensive "teaser" to the real book, volume two. Finally, I am quite curious to see if there is a volume two or is this just more sound and fury signifying nothing.
Comprehensive, Revealing, Entertaining, Suspensful.......2004-08-10
Margaret Morris has written a guided tour through the history of the Great Pyramids and theories about their construction. She is a meticulous historian, showing the errors and contradictions of the popular theories promoted in books and TV documentaries. Rich with quotations by various authorities, detailed in notes, it is readable as a detective story. The reader is left hanging at the end, thirsting for the following book. Therein the contradictions are resolved in a revelation of a new, realistic path of understanding what the Ancient Egytpians achieved and how they did it.
Amazing Book!.......2004-08-05
This is rarely fabulous book! I can't say enough good about it! I picked it up and couldn't put it down until I finished every single word. What makes it so amazing?? It goes into an impressive depth of extremely fascinating information describing head-scratching anomalies of stone monuments and artifacts of Egypt. There's no speculation here. All is taken from respected Egyptology sources. The facts are compiled in this book as I've never seen them before in all my years of reading on the subject! I'd say that, in time, this book will become "The Bible" on how the Egyptian pyramids were and were not built. It demolishes conventional ideas without jumping to wild conclusions. The book is pragmatic. It overwhelmingly, incontrovertibly shows that the accepted theory of pyramid construction is no good; and this book is the most comprehensive study proving that! It's overwhelmingly thorough in this regard. This beautiful book reads like a mystery and is tremendously exciting and fun to read. I am greatly impressed by this ingenious work, and my thinking has totally changed because of it. Volume 1: The Mysteries truly sets a grand stage for Volume 2: The Solution!
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Western Societies: A Documentary History, Volume 1
Brian Tierney
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
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ASIN: 0070648441 |
Book Description
These volumes present a collection of primary source materials from the earliest times to the present intended for use in college courses in Western Civilization. An outstanding feature of the book is the wide variety of source materials included—readings from literary classics, letters, biographies, chronicles, diaries, philosophic and scientific writings, government records. Women’s history is emphasized throughout.
Books:
- The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
- The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
- Traditions & Encounters: Traditions And Encounters
- Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation
- U.S. History for Dummies
- Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America)
- Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History, from Genghis Khan's Mongols to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation
- Vampire : The Masquerade (Revised Edition)
- When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession
- Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Books Index
Books Home
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- The Audrey Hepburn Treasures
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Florida Edition
- The Black Lizard Jim Thompson: After Dark My Sweet, The Alcoholics, The Criminal, Cropper's Cabin, T
- Think and Grow Rich: The 21st-Century Edition: Revised and Updated
- Political Competition, Innovation and Growth: A Historical Analysis
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Documents in World History, Volume I: The Great Tradition: From Ancient Times to 1500 (4th Edition)
Discovering the Global Past: A Look at the Evidence ,Volume II: Since 1400
Plagues and Peoples
