IN PLANNING CIVILIZATION IN THE WEST, our aim was to write a book that students would want to read. Throughout our years of planning, writing, revising, rewriting, and meeting together, this was our constant overriding concern. Would students read our book? Would it be effective in conveying information while stimulating the imagination? Would it work for a variety of Western civilization courses with different levels and formats? It was not easy to keep this concern in the forefront throughout the long months of composition, but it was easy to receive the reactions of scores of reviewers to this simple question: "Would students want to read these chapters?" Whenever we received a resounding "No!" we began again—not just rewriting but rethinking how to present material that might be complex in argument or detail or that might simply seem too remote to engage the contemporary student. Although all three of us were putting in long hours in front of word processors, we quickly learned that we were engaged in a teaching rather than a writing exercise. And though the work was demanding, it was not unrewarding. We hope that you will recognize and come to share with us the excitement and enthusiasm we felt in creating this text. We have enjoyed writing it, and we want students to enjoy reading it.
From the reactions to our first four editions, they have. We have received literally hundreds of cards and letters from adopters and users of Civilization in the West. The response has been both overwhelming and gratifying. It has also been constructive. Along with praise, we have received significant suggestions for making each subsequent edition stronger. Topics such as the Crusades, the Enlightenment, and imperialism have been reorganized to present them more clearly. Subjects such as the ancient Hebrews, Napoleon, and German unification have been given more space and emphasis. New features have been added to freshen the book and keep abreast of current scholarship, and more than 100 excerpts from primary sources are presented to give students a feel for the concreteness of the past. We believe that the fifth edition of Civilization in the West not only preserves the much-praised quality of its predecessors but also enhances it.

Approach

We made a number of decisions early in the project that we believed contributed to our goal. First, we were not writing an encyclopedia on Western civilization. Information was not to be included in a chapter unless it related to the themes of that chapter. There was to be no information for information's sake, and each of us was called upon to defend the inclusion of names, dates, and events whenever we met to critique one another's chapters. We found, to our surprise, that by adhering to the principle that information included must contribute to or illustrate a particular point or dominating theme, we provided as much, if not more, material than books that habitually list names, places, and dates without any other context.
Second, we were committed to integrating the history of ordinary men and women into our narrative. We believe that isolated sections, placed at the end of chapters, that deal with the experiences of women or minority groups in a particular era profoundly distort historical experience. We called this technique caboosing, and whenever we found ourselves segregating women or families or the masses, we stepped back and asked how we might recast our treatment of historical events to account for a diversity of actors. How did ordinary men, women, and children affect the course of historical events? How did historical events affect the fabric of daily life for men and women and children from all walks of life? We tried to rethink critical historical problems of civilization as gendered phenomena. To assist us in the endeavor, we engaged two reviewers whose sole responsibility was to evaluate our chapters for the integration of those social groups into our discussion. We took the same approach to the coverage of central and Eastern Europe that we did to women and minorities. Even before the epochal events of 1989 that returned this region to the forefront of international attention, we realized that in too many textbooks the Slavic world was treated as marginal to the history of Western civilization. Thus, with the help of a specialist reviewer, we worked to integrate more of the history of Eastern Europe into our text than is found in most others, and to do so in a way that presented the regions, their cultures, and their institutions as integral rather than peripheral to Western civilization. To construct a book that students would want to read, we needed to develop fresh ideas about how to involve them with the material, how to transform them from passive recipients to active participants. We borrowed from computer science the concept of being "user-friendly." We wanted to find ways to stimulate the imagination of the student, and the more we experimented with different techniques, the more we realized that the most effective way to do this was visually. It is not true that contemporary students cannot be taught effectively by the written word; it is only true that they cannot be taught as effectively as they can by the combination of words and images. From the beginning, we realized that a text produced in full color was essential to the features we most wanted to use: the pictorial chapter openers; the large number of maps; the geographical tours of Europe at certain times in history; and the two-page special feature in every chapter, each with its own illustration.

Features

It is hard to have a new idea when writing a textbook. So many authors have come before, each attempting to do something more effective, more innovative than his or her predecessor. However, we feel that the following features enhance students' understanding of Western civilization.

The Visual Record: Pictorial Chapter Openers

It is probably the case that somewhere there has been a text that has used a chapter-opening feature similar to the one we use here. What we can say with certainty is that nothing else we experimented with, no other technique we attempted, has had such an immediate and positive impact on our readers or has so fulfilled our goal of involving the students in learning as The Visual Record pictorial chapter openers. An illustration—a painting, a photograph, a picture, an artifact, an edifice—appears at the beginning of each chapter, accompanied by text through which we explore the picture, guiding students across a canvas or helping them see in an artifact or a piece of architecture details that are not immediately apparent. It is the direct combination of text and image that allows us to achieve this effect, to "unfold" both an illustration and a theme. In some chapters we highlight details, pulling out a section of the original picture to take a closer look. In others we attempt to shock the viewer into the recognition of horror or of beauty. Some chapter-opening images are designed to transport students back in time, to make them ask the question, "What was it like to be there?" All of the opening images have been chosen to illustrate a dominant theme within the chapter, and the dramatic and lingering impression they make helps reinforce that theme. A new section, Looking Ahead, provides a brief overview of chapter coverage and further strengthens the connection between the subject of the opener and the major topics and themes of the chapter.

Geographical Tours of Europe

We have taken a similar image-based approach to our presentation of geography. When teachers of Western civilization courses are surveyed, no single area of need is cited more often than that of geographical knowledge. Students simply have no mental image of Europe, no familiarity with those geophysical features that are a fundamental part of the geopolitical realities of Western history. We realized that maps, carefully planned and skillfully executed, would be an important component of our text.

To complement the standard map program of the text, we have added a special geographical feature, the Geographical Tours of Europe. Six times throughout the book, we pause in the narrative to take a tour of Europe. Sometimes we follow an emperor as he tours his realm; sometimes we examine the impact of a peace treaty; sometimes we follow the travels of a merchant. Whatever the thematic occasion, our intention is to guide the student around the changing contours of the geography of Western history. In order to do this effectively, we have worked with our cartographer to develop small, detailed maps to complement the overview map that appears at the beginning of each tour section. We know that only the most motivated students will turn back several pages to locate on a map a place mentioned in the text. Using small maps allows us to integrate maps directly into the relevant text, thus relieving students of the sometimes frustrating experience of attempting to locate not only a specific place on a map but perhaps even the relevant map itself. We have also added labels to all the tour maps and have included in-text references to direct students to relevant maps at specific points in the narrative of the tour. The great number of maps throughout the text, the specially designed tour of Europe geographical feature, and the ancillary programs of map transparencies and workbook exercises combine to provide the strongest possible program for teaching historical geography.

A Closer Look: Special Feature Essays

The third technique we have employed to engage students with historical subjects is the two-page A Closer Look special feature that appears in each chapter. The special features focus on an event, phenomenon, or personality chosen to enhance the student's sense that history is something that is real and alive. The features are written more dramatically and sympathetically, with a greater sense of wonder than would be appropriate in the body of the text. The prose style and the accompanying illustration are designed to captivate the reader. To help the student relate personally and directly to a historical event, we have highlighted figures such as Hypatia of Alexandria, Isabella of Castile, and Sigmund Freud.

Discovering Western Civilization Online

Fourth, Discovering Western Civilization Online encourages students to further explore Western civilization. These end-of-chapter Website resources link students to documents, images, and cultural sites not currently included in the text. A new section in Discovering Western Civilization Online gives students directions on using the ContentSelect Research Database. ContentSelect is an online collection of scholarly articles. Students can access the site using a password which is available free when packaged for qualified college adopters. With online research increasingly a favorite among students, this collection provides a solid and credible bank of articles for research papers or further exploration.

Documents

Finally, Civilization in the West contains selections from primary sources designed to stimulate students' interest in history by allowing them to hear the past speak in its own voice. We have tried to provide a mixture of "canonical" texts along with those illustrating the lives of ordinary people in order to demonstrate the variety of materials that form the building blocks of historical narrative. Each selection is accompanied by an explanatory headnote that identifies the author and work and provides the necessary historical context. Following the headnote are two to three Focus Questions to guide students' reading and to spark critical thinking. Most of the extracts relate directly to discussion within the chapter, thus providing the student with a fuller understanding of a significant thinker or event.

Questions for Review

Although a standard feature in many texts, the Questions for Review in Civilization in the West nonetheless are worth noting. They do not provide just a factual review of the chapter. Instead, they prompt students to think critically about the major topics in the chapter and to pull together for themselves some conclusions about the events and peoples of the time.

Changes in the New Edition

In the fifth edition, we have made significant changes in content and coverage.

Content Changes

The text now opens with a two-page introductory essay: The Idea of Western Civilization. Chapter 5: Imperial Rome, 146 b.c.e.–192 c.e. includes improved coverage on the origins of Christianity and includes a new feature on a day in the Pax Romana. Chapter 9: The High Middle Ages, 900–1300 includes a more comprehensive discussion of medieval society and a new feature on the architecture of gothic cathedrals. In Chapter 10: The Later Middle Ages, 1300–1500, there is more extensive treatment of the multiethnic world of medieval Spain. Chapter 13: The Reform of Religion includes a new feature on More's Utopia. Chapter 17: Science and Commerce in Early Modern Europe includes a new feature on the Dutch tulip mania of the seventeenth century.
Parts of Chapter 20: The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era, 1789–1815 were reorganized to present more clearly the factors leading to the crisis of the Old Regime and the early stages of the revolution. The chapter also includes a new feature on Marie Antoinette. In Chapter 25: Europe and the World, 1870–1914, a new feature explores the power of language in the Belgian Congo. Chapter 30: The West Faces the New Century, 1989 to the Present has been updated and also includes expanded coverage of the European Union and of terrorism in the early twenty-first century. New The Visual Record pictorial essays were developed for the fifth edition as well. Chapter 1: The First Civilizations opens with a pictorial essay on the discovery of the ancient iceman Ötzi; Chapter 5: Imperial Rome, 146 b.c.e.–192 c.e. examines the Augustan Altar of Peace; Chapter 18: The Balance of Power in Eighteenth-Century Europe explores the rise of militarism through an examination of military portraiture; Chapter 21: Industrial Europe examines imagery of technology in the early industrial period; Chapter 28: Global Conflagration: Hot and Cold War opens with Hitler's entry into Austria in 1938; and Chapter 29: Postwar Recovery and the New Europe to 1989 illustrates the devastation of postwar Europe in Warsaw, 1946. We believe that each of these new pictorial essays will help students in understanding the dominant themes of their respective chapters.
Several new primary source documents were also added to this edition. Chapter 2 has a new document from Hesiod on the race of iron; Chapter 9 includes a new document on the Crusades; Chapter 10 includes a new document on religious intolerance in medieval Spain; Chapter 16 includes a new excerpt from Hobbes's Leviathan; Chapter 17 has a new document on encountering pirates; Chapter 19 includes an excerpt on love and marriage from an eighteenth-century periodical; Chapter 20 has two new documents on the rights of French citizens; Chapter 27 includes a new document on the results of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan; and Chapter 30 contains a new document on the war in Chechnya.

There are many new features in our text and much that is out of the ordinary. But there are important traditional aspects of the narrative itself that also require mention. Civilization in the West is a mainstream text in which most of our energies have been placed in developing a solid, readable narrative of Western civilization that integrates coverage of women and minorities into the discussion. We have highlighted personalities while identifying trends. We have spotlighted social history, both in sections of chapters and in separate chapters, while maintaining a firm grip on political developments. We hope that there are many things in this book that teachers of Western civilization will find valuable. But we also hope that there are things here with which you will disagree, themes that you can develop better, arguments and ideas that will stimulate you. A textbook is only one part of a course, and it is always less important than a teacher. What we hope is that by having done our job successfully, we will have made the teacher's job easier and the student's job more enjoyable.

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