Chapters

1. History’s Story
2. Wanderers and Settlers: The Ancient Middle East to 400 B.C.
3. The Chosen People: Hebrews and Jews, 2000 B.C. to A.D. 135
4. Trial of the Hellenes: The Ancient Greeks, 1200 B.C. to A.D. 146
5. Imperium Romanum: The Romans, 753 B.C. to A.D. 300
6. The Revolutionary Rabbi: Christianity, the Roman Empire, and Islam, 4 B.C. to A.D. 1453
7. From Old Rome to the New West: The Early Middle Ages, A.D. 500 to 1000
8. The Medieval Mêlée: The High and Later Middle Ages, 1000 to 1500
9. Making the Modern World: The Renaissance and Reformation, 1400 to 1648
10. Liberation of Mind and Body: Early Modern Europe, 1543 to 1815
11. Mastery of the Machine: The Industrial Revolution, 1764 to 1914
12. The Westerner’s Burden: Imperialism and Nationalism, 1810 to 1918
13. Rejections of Democracy: The InterWar Years and World War II, 1917 to 1945
14. A World Divided: The Early Cold War, 1945 to 1993
15. Into the Future: The Contemporary Era, 1991 to the Present

• Epilogue: Why Western Civilization?

Theme

Summaries

Keywords

Review Questions

Epilogue: Why Western Civilization?

Primary Sources |

Theme

We construct and maintain the meaning and boundaries of Western Civilization. How will you participate therein?

Summaries

“The West exists as long as many of its members and opponents say it exists,” p. 390 (1st Edition), p. 436 (2nd Edition), p. 502 (3rd edition) p. 533 (4th edition).

Keywords

All of them

Review Question

• How should one shape one’s own worldview by picking and choosing from the key legacies of Western civilization?

Other Questions

• “In a changing world, what should we ourselves choose to learn from the past of Western civilization?”
• “Should history remind us of our nobility or convict us of our shame?”
• “Does Western civilization have a future?”
• How have ideas and beliefs have transformed the history of the West? How did intellectual revolutions, like the great philosophers of ancient Greece, the founding of medieval universities, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rise of social sciences and new sciences in the 19th Century support the role of reason? How did the religions of the ancient world become replaced by Christianity, and then how did Christianity sustain and direct Western peoples through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and through the challenges of modernity up to 1914?
• How have materialistic revolutions altered the history of the West? You might consider the following questions: How did the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, Commercial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Scientific Agricultural Revolution, and Industrial Revolutions change material culture? How did political revolutions, whether successful or failed, in city-states and empires of the ancient world, with towns and peasants in Medieval Europe, or in modern England, America, France, and throughout Europe in 1830 and 1848 offer alternative ways of governance?
• What roles have warfare and empire had in the history of the West? You might consider the following questions: How did the achievements of the Greeks and Romans depend on successful warfare, conquest, and imperial rule? How was the Middle Ages shaped around military conflict and what innovations ended its unique political and economic structures? How did Western states in modern times conduct war for political, nationalistic and imperial goals to change the course of World history?