The Western Experience, with Primary Source Investigator and PowerWeb

The Western Experience offers a thorough, analytical overview of Western civilization, giving students an introduction to the major achievements in Western thought, art, and science--as well as the social, political, and economic context for understanding those developments. To help readers develop their reasoning and writing skills, each chapter is constructed to serve as an example of a historical essay in which a historical problem is presented, and arguments are developed using historical evidence. Available in a single volume as well as two-volume and three-volume formats, the ninth edition features many improvements, including the work of Lisa Tiersten in her new chapter on nineteenth-century empires.

Lisa Tiersten is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. at Yale University and has taught at Wellesley College and Barnard College. She has been the recipient of a Chateaubriand Fellowship, a French Historical Studies Society Fellowship, and a Getty Fellowship. She also received the Emily Gregory Teaching Award at Barnard College in 1996. Her publications include Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). She is currently at work on a history of bankruptcy and the culture of credit in modern France, entitled Terms of Trade: The Capitalist Imagination in Modern France, and on an edited volume on the comparative history of children’s rights in twentieth-century Europe. Her research interests include modern France, gender, consumer culture, empire, and the comparative culture of capitalism.