Designed for introductory-level survey courses in World History.
The primary goal of World Civilizations is to present a truly global history–from the development of agriculture and herding to the present. Using a unique periodization, this book divides the main periods of human history according to changes in the nature and extent of global contacts.
This global world history text emphasizes the major stages in the interactions among different peoples and societies, while at the same time assessing the development of major societies. Encompassing social and cultural as well as political and economic history, the book examines key civilizations in world history. World Civilizations balances this discussion of independent developments in the world's major civilizations with comparative analysis of the results of global contact.
Peter N. Stearns
Peter N. Stearns is provost and professor of history
at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D.
from Harvard University. Before moving to George
Mason University, he taught at Rutgers University,
the University of Chicago, and Carnegie Mellon,
where he won the Robert Doherty Educational
Leadership Award and the Elliott Dunlap Smith Teaching Award. He has
taught world history for more than 15 years. He currently serves as chair
of the Advanced Placement World History Committee and also founded
and is the editor of the Journal of Social History. In addition to textbooks
and readers, he has written studies of gender and consumerism in a world
history context. Other books address modern social and cultural history
and include studies on gender, old age, work, dieting, and emotion. His
most recent book in this area is American Fear: Causes and Consequences
of High Anxiety.
Michael Adas
Michael Adas is the Abraham Voorhees Professor of
History and a board of governor’s chair at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Over the
past couple of decades his teaching has focused on
patterns and processes of global and comparative
history. His courses on race and empire in the early
modern and industrial eras and on world history in the 20th century have
earned him a number of teaching prizes. In addition to texts on world
history, Adas has written mainly on the comparative history of colonialism
and its impact on the peoples and societies of Asia and Africa. His
books include Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and
Ideologies of Western Dominance, which won the Dexter Prize, and the recently
published Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and
America’s Civilizing Mission. He is currently writing a global history of the
First World War.
Stuart B. Schwartz
Stuart B. Schwartz was born and educated in Springfield,
Massachusetts, and then attended Middlebury
College and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico.
He has an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University
in Latin American history. He taught for many
years at the University of Minnesota and joined the
faculty at Yale University in 1996. He has also taught in Brazil, Puerto
Rico, Spain, France, and Portugal. He is a specialist on the history of colonial
Latin America, especially Brazil, and is the author of numerous
books, notably Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society
(1985), which won the Bolton Prize for the best book in
