Western Civilization

Spielvogel provides a focused, consistent, and engaging narrative throughout the text. The author is an award-winning teacher and scholar whose clear, lively, and informative writing style has made this text so successful with students. Numerous testimonials state that a primary reason professors use the text is because their students can read and understand it at schools that range from Ivy League universities to two-year technical colleges.

The text's selection of primary source materials is unmatched. More than 250 letters, song lyrics, official documents, diary entries, menus, poems, plays, and the like give students access to the kinds of materials historians use to shape their interpretations of the past. These sources vividly reveal what Western civilization meant to the men and women who shaped it. New document boxes include: "The Code of Assura" (Ch. 2); "Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun" (Ch. 7); "The Steam Engine and Cotton" (Ch. 20); "Women's Soccer, 1881" (Ch. 23) and "The West and Islam" (Ch. 30).

"Opposing Viewpoints" features, which present a comparison of two or three primary sources in order to facilitate student analysis of historical documents, appear in most chapters. Topics include "The Great Flood: Two Versions" (Ch. 1); "Women in Athens and Sparta" (Ch. 3); "Causes of the Black Death" (Ch. 11); "Women in the Age of the Enlightenment: Rousseau and Wollstonecraft" (Ch. 17); and "Islam and the West: Secularism in France" (Ch. 30). Assignable questions at the end of each feature aid individual or collaborative study.

End-of-chapter review material includes an illustrated Chapter Summary, a Chapter Timeline, and Chapter Review consisting of "Upon Reflection" essay questions and Key Terms from the chapter.