Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations

Placing value in perspective―a rich primary source collection at a truly exceptional value.

Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations features a diverse range of primary sources for analysis, offering a total of 225 classic and contemporary documents of varying length. The Sixth Edition’s table of contents has been reorganized to mirror Western Civilizations’ chronology and emphasis on the global context for the West―a revision process overseen by Joshua Cole and Carol Symes, our dynamic co-authors of Western Civilizations, Full and Brief Editions. Selections are largely informed by instructor feedback, reflecting the documents most widely assigned in the course and rendering Perspectives from the Past the most extensive and diverse reader available.

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.?

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.

Carol Symes is Professor of history and Director of the program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she has won the top teaching award in the College of Liberal Arts and Science. Her main areas of study include medieval Europe, especially France and England, cultural history, history of information media and communication technologies, and history of theatre. Her first book was A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (2007). (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). She also founded?The Medieval?Globe,?the first academic journal to promote and model methods for studying the interconnectivity of the medieval world. Her forthcoming project,?Modern War and the Medieval Past,?explores the ways that?ideas, monuments, and landscapes associated with the Middle Ages were sentimentalized, targeted, destroyed, and revived before, during, and after the Great War.