World History: The Human Odyssey, Student Text: Student Text - Hardcover

Spielvogel, Jackson J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0314205616 ISBN 13: 9780314205612

Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 1997

Synopsis

Recent world history in a motivating format
"Glencoe World History: Modern Times" draws on the features of "Glencoe World History" to motivate students, help them understand the connections between recent world events and issues, and give them an appreciation for the interconnectedness of the world's regions and peoples.

About this title

About the Author:

William J. Duiker is liberal arts Professor Emeritus of East Asian studies at The Pennsylvania State University. A former U.S. diplomat with service in Taiwan, South Vietnam, and Washington, D.C., he received his doctorate in Far Eastern history from Georgetown University in 1968, where his dissertation dealt with the Chinese educator and reformer Cai Yuanpei. At Penn State, he has written extensively on the history of Vietnam and modern China, including the highly acclaimed COMMUNIST ROAD TO POWER IN VIETNAM (revised edition, Westview Press, 1996), which was selected for a Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award in 1982--1983 and 1996-1997. Other recent books are CHINA AND VIETNAM: THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT (Berkeley, 1987), U.S. CONTAINMENT POLICY AND THE CONFLICT IN INDOCHINA (Stanford, 1995), SACRED WAR: NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION IN A DIVIDED VIETNAM (McGraw-Hill, 1995), and HO CHI MINH (Hyperion, 2000), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. While his research specialization is in the field of nationalism and Asian revolutions, his intellectual interests are considerably more diverse. He has traveled widely and has taught courses on the history of communism and non-Western civilizations at Penn State, where he was awarded a Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the spring of 1996. In 2002, the College of Liberal Arts honored him with an Emeritus Distinction Award.

Review:

"As a general world history text, (Duiker/Spielvogel) provides a comprehensive text that is appropriate for an undergraduate world history course. It avoids the tendency to be a fact-based text, where students are simply given a list of events and general themes to be regenerated on the exam. In other words, your text does not amount to a mindless dispensing of innumerable facts. Besides this, the text is a thorough survey of the movements of people, ideas and goods, and it achieves the goal of globalizing history by crossing intellectual, institutional and international boundaries."

"I have been using editions of this text for several years in my History of World Civilization I classes, and although I have reviewed several other competitors, I remain convinced that this is the best overall work for my classes. The writing is generally clear and interesting, the maps and chronologies are useful, the text boxes are enlightening and the illustrations are usually excellent."

"Far more than other world and western surveys, the Duiker/Spielvogel texts provide instructors with a large amount of quality, primary documentary material. ... The documents are well-chosen and edited, and provide instructors with many opportunities to draw students into discussion and give them a good understanding of how historians interpret the raw data of the past."

"This is a high-quality text. I appreciate D/S's emphasis on World History, as it is supported by solid presentation of geography, major events, leading biographies, and significant social and cultural themes. The book is a serious tool for the study of History at the college level. The book's approach blends art, architecture, maps, and quotations, making the D/S World History book a more complete package than some other similar texts. Students who study this book thoroughly will acquire a sound background of the historical forces at work in the world's from early times to the present. Students will be exposed to the world's major cultures, and the central events, issues, and trends that have shaped them. As is stated on pg. xxiv of the Preface, this text is to be well-balanced, avoiding some of the typical over-emphases that often characterize approaches to history survey courses today: a narrow focus on politics and thought or, at the other end of things, a social emphasis that can seem to exclude major events, figures, and other specific facts."

"(B)ased on my experience, this is the best World History text I have found."

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Glencoe
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0314205616
• ISBN 13: 9780314205612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1121