2S1SN

xxii

An Interview with the Authors

Q: Why “Many Europes”?

A: In historical terms, there never was a “single” Europe. The history of the European continent has always been one of many diverse peoples, languages, and regions, each seeking to survive, and striving to preserve and promote its own identity in the competitive world that was wider Europe. Diversity not unity, nations not empire, explain a great deal about the energy and dynamism of the history we study in Western civilization courses.

Q: Is this a new approach to Western civilization?

A: Absolutely. We think of it as an introduction to Western Civilization for a new generation, one that views “the West” as an important part of the world, but not the only part worth studying. With the growth of the world history course, we need to approach the history of the West in new ways and to search out what makes the many Europes dif-ferent from the other great historical powers in Asia and the Middle East. One great difference is that the European continent rarely achieved the great and dominant empires that China and Islam did. Why, and is that important in ac-counting for the historical personality of the West? By look-ing at the strivings of the many Europes, its individuals and groups, we hope to present the Western civ experience in a vivid, fresh, and relevant way.

Q: You also invite students to think in terms of “Big Europe.” How is that different?

A: Too many Western civilization textbooks focus almost exclusively on Britain, France, and Germany. In Many Europes, we made it our goal to stretch the boundaries, physical and intellectual, of Europe, integrating the vitally important, fascinating, and often blood-spattered histories of southern, central, and eastern Europe. Naturally, we also include the civilizations of Egypt, Islam, and Persia that have always been part of shaping what the many Europes could and could not be. All of them had a critical impact on the history and contours of Western civilization.

Q: Your subtitle is Choice and Chance in Western Civilization. Why did you choose those themes?

A: The subtitle refl ects our fundamental conviction that people make history through their choices and their struggles to overcome particular problems and dilemmas. We believe that students engage best with history when they recognize that real human beings, whether in ancient Rome, medieval Byzantium, revolutionary France, or Nazi

Germany, had to make diffi cult decisions while caught up in turbulent times, with a limited set of ideas and options available to them.

Q: That explains choice; what about chance?

A: Flesh and blood humans make history, but, as Karl Marx noted long ago, they cannot make it exactly as they wish. Chance intrudes—often in the form of external events such as dramatic or long-term weather changes, economic downturns, famines, and pandemic diseases that force people and societies to respond as best they can. Even Europe’s most powerful rulers encountered unexpected forms of opposition within as well as outside their borders, and were compelled to change their plans. So, chance may matter as much as choice in shaping both individual lives and collective experiences.

Q: By “choice and chance,” are you talking about the idea of contingency?

A: Exactly. Things didn’t have to turn out the way they did. Surprising events, decisions, and actions of individu-als and groups often turned the course of events in a new direction—for example, Constantine’s unexpected embrace of Christianity and creation of a New Rome in Constantinople. We highlight the important idea of con-tingency with a feature in every chapter entitled “What a Difference a Year Makes.” It gives students an understand-ing of how changeable history is, how pivotal some choices and some events were, in contrast to how inevitable it all seems when we view history backwards. In Many Europes, we try to strike a balance between the micro and macro levels, choice and chance, but we seek always to emphasize lived experience, what it was like to be there, in a particular historical time. Context, in other words, is essential to outcomes, and we believe it a mistake to ride a wave of events without looking below the surface to the vast and sometimes ordinary forces at work generat-ing change.

Q: Why is this idea of “lived experience” important?

A: Students can understand the choices made by individu-als in the past only when we help them think themselves back into the historical and cultural contexts in which the actors lived—what it was like to be a Roman senator, an English peasant after the Norman Conquest, or a Victorian scullery maid. We can engage students in history by show-ing them how fascinating these stories are and why they still matter today, rather than overwhelming them with

PREFACE

dut8545X_fm_i-xxxi.indd 22 11/21/12 7:06 AM

2S1SN

xxiiiPREFACE

endless detail. So, we have selected illustrative and grip-ping human stories that reveal the past and its actors rather than offering an encyclopedic presentation of “one damned thing after another.”

Q: How do primary sources fit into your program?

A: We are excited to offer instructors and students a rich portfolio of relevant and revealing primary sources to accompany the textbook. Not only have we included a primary source exercise at the end of each chapter, but we have also included a wide selection of additional primary source exercises tailored to our narrative in the associated digital program. The same choice of primary sources is available through McGraw-Hill’s Create for instructors who want to customize their course materials with specific read-ings or even create their own reader.

Q: Is your narrative shorter than that of other “full-sized” Western civilization books?

A: Another of our departures from most other Western civilization texts involves making the narrative more con-cise. We have reduced the standard number of chapters from thirty to twenty-six, making it easier for instructors to cover the material in an average school year. In some cases, our chapter order reflects a compromise between chronological and thematic approaches to the subject. For the sake of student attention and a coherent presentation of historical phases, we separate early Rome and the mature Roman Republic from the collapse of the Republic and the Roman Empire, and treat the crusades as separate events and not as a single set of connected events. We also com-bine the material usually divided between chapters on the Industrial Revolution and on nation-building to emphasize the simultaneity of the two processes throughout most of Europe. This combination gives new punch to liberalism and nationalism, two forces that are alive in neo-versions today. But we have left room at the end of the book for a full chapter on Europe since 1989, recognizing that students today want and need to know about the developments and crises the continent has experienced since the end of the Cold War. We bring the story right up to the Eurocrisis, a development that helps us see clearly that even as economic integration, technological transformations, and cultural globalization have made life across the continent more uni-form, the many-ness of Europe remains.

Q: What other unique features support student engagement?

A: Boxed features in each chapter ask students to think about the variety of ways in which history can be seen and done. In addition to “What a Difference a Year Makes,” each chapter has a feature titled “Investigating the Past,” which examines how historians work—how they use new evidence and approaches to throw fresh light on the past and historical mysteries.

Another feature, “Things That Remain,” gives students a sense of the ways in which objects can open up the past to us and lead to valuable insights. Our explorations range from what new DNA testing can tell us about the plague that struck China, Islam, and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, to a look at nineteenth-century Parisian depart-ment stores and the films of the great Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein. We also include one last feature in each chapter, called “Other Voices, Other Views.” It offers students other per-spectives than those of the dominant voices of European history. Groups and individuals outside the main politi-cal and cultural centers of Europe had something to say about the prevailing narrative; they did not sit silently on the margins and watch it all happen without criticism and complaint. This feature seeks to hear them out, to give them back their compelling voices. Students are enriched, we be-lieve, when they view events such as Roman imperialism, voyages of exploration, and World War II from different vantage points.

Q: Finally, why is your book different from others and do you do anything new?

A: Our emphases are certainly different. Grounding the narrative in people and their lived experience of transfor-mative events; engaging students in a history that is not fixed but shaped by the decisions people made and the chance events that shaped their historical circumstances; and viewing Europe and the West as the special story of the competition between groups, regions, and peoples, with no one side dominating for long, make Many Europes a book about a history that is still unfolding, still full of tension and energy, still engaging from first to last, and its future unfixed. And, yes, we hope to challenge instructors and stu-dents with new arguments, approaches, and ways to think about western history. We seek to engage readers in pre-senting to them the idea that ancient Greece drew its rich-ness not from its unity, but from its manyness; we ask if the story of the Reformation might better be told not as one of reform but rather as one of the restructuring of religion across Europe. In the book’s second half, we describe an early nineteenth century in which accelerating differences between western industrializing and eastern and south-ern rural regions made Europe a more diverse place than ever before. Our presentation of twentieth-century events focuses, unusually, on events in eastern and southeastern Europe where, we argue, the fates of nations and the fate of the continent as a whole were decided. Our readers need not agree with us, and we hope that they won’t always do so, but we do sincerely hope that they will have stimulat-ing discussions about the material itself by thinking about western history in new ways. The history of the many Europes and the West have earned our attention, mindful-ness, and heightened engagement, for we are still living with it and within it.

dut8545X_fm_i-xxxi.indd 23 11/21/12 7:06 AM