Art in World History

The twenty-two illustrated articles in Art in World History put readers in touch with art from the Paleolithic period, to the millennium-long heyday of porcelain, to performance art of the postmodernist world. They explore fundamental questions about the ?origins of art making and the case for including visual studies in world history. The volume balances and interweaves regional coverage with cross-cultural connections-when trade brought Chinese silk to the Romans in the first century ce, for instance, or how the celebrated nineteenth-century Japanese printmakers, Hokusai and Hiroshige, used one-point perspective, a Western technique. Overviews on vernacular architecture and textiles examine how the study of these art forms can provide insight on a people's aesthetic sense and development, as well as on the cultural, political, and socioeconomic aspects of their lives.

David Christian is a professor of world history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and co-founder, with Bill Gates, of the Big History Project. In 1989, Christian began teaching the first course on ""big history,"" an interdisciplinary field that examines history starting with the Big Bang, and his work came to the attention of Bill Gates through a video course produced by The Teaching Company. He is the author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, which won the World History Association book prize (2004), and is writing a history of Central Asia. He is also the author of Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation and (with R. E. F. Smith) Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia. He has spoken about big history at the TED Conference, the World Economic Forum, and on the Comedy Central program The Colbert Report.