The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, Volume I: To 1750

by Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein

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.

Genres: History

581 pages, Paperback

Published January 4, 2012

About the author

Lynn Avery Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cultural history on such topics as gender. Her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2002.

Reviews

[Danielle. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected nothing more than a condensed textbook on the history of the development of Western civilization; as a History major, this was a required textbook for one of the History courses I was taking. Some chapters were just an absolute snooze fest; their understanding on religion is greatly flawed and tries to push the students to believe their narrative--especially on Judaism and Christianity (the historians' incorrect narratives on these main religions saddened me; they've left out SO much, explained so little and used superficial similarities to 'prove' their case on different religions which, frankly, proved nothing but lack of poor scholarship). One thing I absolutely enjoyed reading about, however, was Ancient Greece, the Republic of Rome, the Roman Empire, and the Medieval Ages. Afterwards, the rest of the chapters seemed rushed. I did not read the last two chapters of the textbook seeing as it was about the establishment of slavery in the Americas, a course of which I took.

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice well written school book. Well laid out and organized. Recommended

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

very basic and general overview of western civilization.