The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures - Tapa dura

Students of Western civilization need more than facts. They need to understand the cross-cultural, global exchanges that shaped Western history; to be able to draw connections between the social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual happenings in a given era; and to see the West not as a fixed region, but a living, evolving construct. These needs have long been central to The Making of the West. The book’s chronological narrative emphasizes the wide variety of peoples and cultures that created Western civilization and places them together in a common context, enabling students to witness the unfolding of Western history, understand change over time, and recognize fundamental relationships. Read the preface.

LYNN HUNT (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of several books, including most recently The First Global Vision of Religion, The Book that Changed Europe, Measuring Time, Making History, and Inventing Human Rights. THOMAS R. MARTIN (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Jeremiah O’Connor Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of Ancient Greece, Sovereignty and Coinage in Classical Greece and is one of the originators of Perseus: Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greece (www.perseus.tufts.edu). He is currently conducting research on the career of Pericles as a political leader in classical Athens as well as on the text of Josephus' Jewish War. BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author or editor of several books including A Short History of the Middle Ages and Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. She is currently working on a general history of the emotions in the West. BONNIE G. SMITH (Ph.D., University of Rochester) is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is author or editor of several books including The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History; The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice; and Ladies of the Leisure Class. Currently she is studying the globalization of European culture and society since the seventeenth century.