The West in the World, Updated Edition with Primary Source Investigator and PowerWeb

by Dennis Sherman

There’s a new source for primary The West in the World. The updated edition features a new emphasis on primary sources, within the text, on the accompanying Primary Source Investigator CD, and on the text’s website. In this social history woven into a political and cultural framework, Sherman and Salisbury examine how the West influenced and was influenced by civilizations around the globe. This groundbreaking text distinguishes itself by fully integrating visual history within the narrative. The authors show that works of art serve as primary sources of information about specific periods in history. The West in the World also includes visual learning tools such as "Thinking about Geography" maps with guiding questions, and timelines at the beginning and end of each chapter. This complete, innovative coverage of western civilization is a midsize book, providing more detail than brief books do, without being unmanageable (as some larger survey texts have become).

Genres: History

1024 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ed Callahan · Rating 4 out of 5]

By and large, I think that Sherman and Salisbury do a nice job of summarizing the history of Western Civilization and presenting it against the backdrop of wider world history. Writing about Western Civilization presents its own challenges, since it necessitates a Eurocentric point of view. It's easy, and tempting, for the writer to ignore events and developments in other continents, or even in other parts of the Afro-Eurasian world in which Western Civilization developed. Eurocentricity dominates this text, as it must.

Overall, I value the authors' careful and balanced approach to the material, and find that it is a very helpful introduction for basic university level courses on Western Civilization.