A History of World Societies, Value Edition, Volume 1

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) taught first at Augustana College in Illinois, and since 1985 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is currently UWM Distinguished Professor in the department of history. She is the coeditor of the Sixteenth Century Journal and the author or editor of more than twenty books, most recently The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds and Gender in History. She is the former Chief Reader for Advanced Placement World History. Patricia B. Ebrey (Ph.D., Columbia University), Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle, specializes in China. She has published numerous journal articles and The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, as well as numerous monographs. In 2010 she won the Shimada Prize for outstanding work of East Asian Art History for Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong. Roger B. Beck (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Distinguished Professor of African and twentieth-century world history at Eastern Illinois University. His publications include The History of South Africa, a translation of P. J. van der Merwe's The Migrant Farmer in the History of the Cape Colony, 1657-1842, and more than a hundred articles, book chapters, and reviews. He is a former treasurer and Executive Council member of the World History Association. Jerry Davila (Ph.D., Brown University) is Jorge Paulo Lemann professor of Brazilian History at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Dictatorship in South America; Hotel Tropico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, winner of the Latin Studies Association Brazil Section Book prize; and of Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945. He has served as president of the Conference on Latin American History. John P. McKay (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. He has written or edited numerous works, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize-winning book Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913.

Preface.- The Earliest Human Societies, to 2500 B.C.E..- 2. Complex Societies in Southwest Asia and the Nile Valley, 3800-500 B.C.E..- 3. The Foundation of Indian Society, to 300 C.E..- 4. China's Classical Age, to 221 B.C.E..- 5. The Greek Experience, 3500-30 B.C.E..- 6. The World of Rome, ca. 1000 B.C.E.-400 C.E..- 7. East Asia and the Spread of Buddhism, 221 B.C.E.-800 C.E..- 8. Continuity and Change in Europe and Western Asia, 250-850.- 9. The Islamic World, 600-1400.- 10. African Societies and Kingdoms, 1000 B.C.E.-1500 C.E..- 11. The Americas, 3200 B.C.E.-1500 C.E..- 12. Cultural Exchange in Central and Southern Asia, 300-1400.- 13. States and Cultures in East Asia, 800-1400.- 14. Europe and Western Asia in the Middle Ages, 800-1450.- 15. Europe in the Renaissance and Reformation, 1350-1600.- 16. The Acceleration of Global Contact, 1450-1600.