Understanding World Societies, Second Edition, features a brief, question-driven narrative that models for students the inquiry-based methods used by historians and helps students understand what's really important to know about world history. The second edition presents LaunchPad, a new intuitive ebook and course space with LearningCurve adaptive quizzing and a wealth of activities and assessments that help students make progress toward learning outcomes. LaunchPad features primary source activities, map and visual activities, adaptive and summative quizzing, and a wealth of optional resources, including carefully developed Online Document Projects for each chapter with auto-graded exercises. LaunchPad is easy to use and can be integrated with your school's course management system, giving you the tools for enhanced teaching and learning.
About the Author: 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.
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.
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.
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.
Clare Haru Crowston (Ph.D., Cornell University) teaches at the University of Illinois, where she is currently associate professor of history. She is the author of Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791, which won the Berkshire and Hagley Prizes. She edited two special issues of the Journal of Women's History, has published numerous journal articles and reviews, and is a past president of the Society for French Historical Studies.
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