Traditions & encounters

"On the basis of a superficial inspection, Traditions & Encounters might look similar to several other textbooks that survey the world's past. Like other books, for example, Traditions & Encounters examines the historical development of societies in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Yet Traditions & Encounters differs from other works in two particularly important ways. First, it relies on a pair of prominent themes to bring a global perspective to the study of world history: it traces the historical development of individual societies in all world regions, and it also focuses attention systematically on interactions between peoples of different societies. Second, it organizes the human past into seven eras that represent distinct and coherent periods of global historical development"--Preface (Page xvi).