The Western Experience

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. The updated 10th edition now offers streamlined coverage the early nineteenth century and significantly updated post World War II coverage. To help readers develop their reasoning and writing skills, each chapter is constructed to serve as an example of a historical essay: A historical problem is presented, and arguments are developed using historical evidence. The Western Experience is available in a single volume as well as two-volume format.

Mortimer Chambers is a Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a Rhodes scholar from 1949 to 1952 and received an M.A. from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1955 after obtaining his doctorate from Harvard University in 1954. He has taught at Harvard University (1954-1955) and the University of Chicago (1955-1958). He was visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia in 1958, the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1971, The University of Freiburg (Germany) in 1974 and Vassar College in 1988. A specialist in Greek and Roman history, he is a co-author of Aristotle’s History of Athenian Democracy (1962), editor of a series of essays entitled The Fall of Rome (1963), and author of Georg Busolt: His Career in His Letters (1990) and of Staat der Athener, a German translation and commentary to Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians (1990). He has edited Greek texts of the latter work (1986) and of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (1993). He has contributed articles to the American Historical Review and Classical Philology as well as other journals, both in America and in Europe.

Barbara Hanawalt is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota and the author of numerous books and articles on the social and cultural history of The Middle Ages. Her publications include Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (1998), Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (1993), The Ties That Bound: Peasant Life in Medieval England (1986), and Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (1979). She received her M. A. in 1964 and her Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Michigan. She has served as president of the Social Science History Association and has been on the Council of the American Historical Association and the Medieval Academy of America. As Director of the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota (1990-1997) she edited five volumes on the intersection of history and literature. She was an NEH Fellow (1997-98, a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation (1988-1989), an ACLS Fellow (1975-1976), and a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1997-1998), a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (1990-1991), a member of the School of Historical Research at the Institute for Advanced Study (l982-1983), and senior research fellow at the Newberry Library (1979-1980).

Theodore K. Rabb is Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton, and subsequently taught as Stanford, Northwestern, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins universities. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews, and has been editor of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History since its foundation. Among his books are The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe and Renaissance Lives and The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity. Professor Rabb has held offices in various national organizations, including the American Historical Association and The National Council for Historical Education. He was the principal historian for the PBS series, Renaissance.

Isser Woloch is Professor of History at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. (1965) from Princeton University in the field of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European history. He has taught at Indiana University and at the University of California at Los Angeles where, in 1967, he received a Distinguished Teaching Citation. He has been a fellow of the A.C.L.S., the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His publications include Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory (1970), The Peasantry in the Old Regime: Conditions and Protests (1970), The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration (1979), and Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1715-1789 (1982), and The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (1994).

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.