Crossroads and Cultures, Volume I: To 1450: A History of the World's Peoples

Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World's Peoples incorporates the best current cultural history into a fresh and original narrative that connects global patterns of development with life on the ground. As the title, "Crossroads," suggests, this new synthesis highlights the places and times where people exchanged goods and commodities, shared innovations and ideas, waged war and spread disease, and in doing so joined their lives to the broad sweep of global history. Students benefit from a strong pedagogical design, abundant maps and images, and special features that heighten the narrative's attention to the lives and voices of the world's peoples. Test drive a chapter today. Find out how.

About the Author :
Bonnie G. Smith (PhD, University of Rochester) is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. She has written numerous works in European and global history, including Ladies of the Leisure Class; Changing Lives: Women in European History since 1700; and Imperialism. She is editor of Global Feminisms since 1945 and Women s History in Global Perspective; coeditor of the New Oxford World History series; and general editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Currently she is studying the globalization of European culture and society since the seventeenth century. Marc Van De Mieroop (PhD, Yale University) is Professor of History at Columbia University. His research focuses on the ancient history of the Near East from a long-term perspective and extends across traditionally established disciplinary boundaries. Among his many works are The Ancient Mesopotamian City; Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History; A History of the Ancient Near East; The Eastern Mediterranean in the Age of Ramesses II; and A History of Ancient Egypt. Richard von Glahn (PhD, Yale University) is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. A specialist in Chinese economic history, Richard is the author of The Country of Streams and Grottoes Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times; Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000 1700; and The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. He is also coeditor of The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History and Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470 1800. His current research focuses on monetary history on a global scale, from ancient times to the recent past. Kris Lane (PhD, University of Minnesota) is the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University. Kris specializes in colonial Latin American history and the Atlantic world, and his great hope is to globalize the teaching and study of the early Americas. His publications include Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500 1750; Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition; and Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires. He also edited Bernardo de Vargas Machuca s The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies and Defense and Discourse of the Western Conquest. "