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.
What's in the LaunchPad
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 Dávila (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 Trópico: 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.
New author Jerry Dávila brings an enhanced focus on Latin America. The second edition adds a Latin Americanist to its team of stellar scholars. Dávila has also completely rewritten the chapters on the 20th century raising current questions and tracing globalization throughout the century.
LaunchPad helps you do more than you can with print alone. Free when packaged with the book, LaunchPad’s course space and interactive e-book is ready to use as is, or can be edited and customized with your own material, and assigned right away. Developed with extensive feedback from history instructors and students, LaunchPad includes the complete narrative e-book, as well as abundant primary documents, maps, images, videos, assignments and activities. The aims of key learning outcomes are addressed via formative and summative assessment, short answer and essay questions, multiple choice quizzing, and LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool designed to get students to read before they come to class. Available with training and support, LaunchPad can help you take your teaching into a new era.
LearningCurve ensures students come to class prepared. Tired of your students not reading the textbook? Would you like to know what they read and how much they understood—BEFORE they come to class? Assign LearningCurve, the adaptive learning tool created for your survey textbook in LaunchPad, and the system’s analytics will show how your students are doing with the reading so that you can adapt your class as needed. Each chapter-based LearningCurve activity gives students multiple chances to understand key concepts, return to the narrative textbook if they need to reread, and answer questions correctly. Over 90% of students report satisfaction with LearningCurve's fun and accessible game-like interface. LearningCurve appeals to students so that they engage with the textbook, and it helps you to know what they know before class begins.
New assignable online document projects allow students to put interpretation into practice in LaunchPad. Each project, based on the “Individuals in Society” feature, prompts students to explore a key question through analysis of multiple sources. Chapter 22, for example, asks students to analyze documents on the complexities of the Haitian Revolution and the conditions that made Toussaint L'Ouverture’s story possible. Auto-graded multiple-choice questions based on the documents help students analyze the sources.
A range of options offers convenience and value. In addition to the standard bound textbook, this edition is also available in convenient, discount-priced loose-leaf and PDF formats and in an interactive e-book format in the text’s dedicated version of LaunchPad, with all accompanying study resources fully integrated. LaunchPad is a complete course’s worth of material in a course space that makes everything assignable and assessable—and all for free when packaged with the textbook.
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