Traditions & Encounters offers an inclusive vision of the global pastȕone that is meaningful and appropriate for the interdependent world of contemporary times. Given the diversity of human societies, gathering and organizing the sheer mass of information in a meaningful way is a daunting challenge for any world history survey course. The seven-part chronological organization enables students to understand the development of the world through time, while also exploring broader, big-picture thematic issues in world history. Through new and revised chapter-level and part-level features, the hallmark twin themes of traditions and encounters emerge in greater clarity than ever before in this sixth edition. As a result, students have resources that enable them to move beyond the facts of history and examine the past critically, analyze causes and effects, and recognize similarities and differences across world regions and time periods. By digging deeper into the implications of world historyșs storiesȕnot just the who, the what, and the where, but also the why and the howȕstudents can make sense of the human past.

About the Author

Jerry H. Bentley was professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i and editor of the

Journal of World History. His research on the religious, moral, and political writings of

Renaissance humanists led to the publication of Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament

Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983) and Politics and Culture in Renaissance

Naples (Princeton, 1987). More recently, his research was concentrated on global history

and particularly on processes of cross-cultural interaction. His book Old World Encounters:

Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993) examines

processes of cultural exchange and religious conversion before the modern era, and his pamphlet

Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, D.C., 1996)

discusses the historiography of world history. His most recent publication is The Oxford

Handbook of World History (Oxford, 2011), and he served as a member of the editorial team

preparing the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World. Jerry Bentley passed away in

July 2012.

Heather E. Streets-Salter is department chair and director of world history programs at Northeastern University. She is the author of Marital Races: The Military, Martial Races, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (2004), Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective (2015) with Trevor Getz, and Southeast Asia and the Frist World War (forthcoming 2016). Her current research focuses on communist and anti-communist networks in interwar East and Southeast Asia.