Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations: From the Ancient Near East through the Age of Absolutism

Perspectives from the Past is the most flexible and substantial reader for use in the two-semester Western Civilizations course.

The wealth of selections accommodates most any course curriculum, and the readings may be used on their own or in conjunction with a textbook.

James Brophy is the Francis H. Squire Professor of History specializing in modern European history at the University of Delaware. He received his B.A. from Vassar College and did his graduate training at the Universität Tubingen and Indiana University, where he specialized in the social and political history of nineteenth-century Europe. He is the author of Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830–1870 and Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850.

Joshua Cole (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is professor of history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His research focuses on gender and the history of population sciences, colonial violence, and the politics of memory in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, Germany, and Algeria. His first book was The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). His most recent book,?Lethal Provocation:? The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria?(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)?is a study of the worst episode of anti-Jewish violence on French territory in peacetime in the twentieth century, the August 1934 riots in Constantine, a city in French Algeria.?

Steven Epstein teaches history at the University of Kansas. He was educated at Swarthmore College, St. John’s College (Cambridge University), and Harvard College, where he developed his interests in medieval social and economic history. He is the author of Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (2000), Genoa and the Genoese 958―1528 (1996).


John Robertson received both his M.A. and his Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the social and economic history of the Ancient Near East, Professor Robertson has published several articles in major scholarly journals and contributed articles to such major reference works as the recently published Encyclopedia of Ancient History (2012) and Cursed Cradle: A Short History of Mesopotamia/Iraq (2013).

Thomas Max Safley is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the economic and social history of early modern Europe, his particular research interests include the history of the Reformation, the family, charity, work, and business. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, Professor Safley is the author of Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest, 1550–1620 and Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of early modern Augsburg.