A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories) First Edition

Professor Wiesner-Hanks provides a Witty and compelling interpretation of world history for general readers and students. Her use of social and gendered examples of changes and continuities over time in relevant parts of the world lead to a nuanced view of tour pasts.

I was a little hesitant to get this, as the broad coverage covers a lot in each chapter. I have read chapters 3 and 4 where the remnants of the Roman/Silk Road world give way to the Modern World, covering up to 1800. Quite good. Index works looking for country based history. Courts and culture covered well. Any more detail on that topic I get bored. We have a lot of recorded and written history for China on that.The chapter on A New World of Connections was useful for me in preparing a class. Ordered her European History book as well, as it covers the colonial era and the countries involved (outside Europe).Other books in this type of world history sweeping surveys go under the heading "big history."

This book is GROSS and I thought it would be in better condition considering it was almost full price. I should’ve just bought a new one. It has food stains, ripped pages, covered in stickers, the book cover is actually messed up, there’s writing in it, everything. Take my advice and but the new book, it’s worth the extra few dollars.

With a breezy and easy to read style the author manages to cover millennia and tie the pieces together.

To be concise and academically valuable is not easy. Prof Wiesner-Hanks achieves this quite impressively. Since I often teach courses on "small" topics which are rather zealously ignored in global history texts, I was pleasantly surprised that she considered it important to devote several pages to such "trivium" as pastoral nomadism (pp. 172-77). Nor was she timid to state the historical truth that "Islam allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims. ... Arabs built a commercial network ... shipping slaves..." (p. 328) or that "Collective farms were supposed to increase output but they did not, and there was mass famine..." (p. 328) Indeed,sometimes less can be quite a sufficient start.

I was hoping more for a concise history of the world, not history focused on gender inequality