Readings Honors World History 415 - Semester 2 - 2010 - Calvert Hall
Explore the seminal texts of world history from Calvert Hall's 2010 Honors course, including *The Last Days of the Incas*, *Genghis Khan*, and *The Crusades Through Arab Eyes*. This curated reading list covers epic journeys, plagues, and Islamic history for advanced students.
Book
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
by Jack Weatherford
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan. The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.
Book
The Travels of Ibn Battuta in the Near East, Asia and Africa 1325-1354
by Ibn Batuta
In 1326, Ibn Battuta began a pilgrimage to Mecca that ended 27 years and 75,000 miles later. His engrossing account of that journey provides vivid scenes from Morocco, southern Russia, India, China, and elsewhere. "Essential reading . . . the ultimate in real life adventure stories." — History in Review.
Book
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
by Amin Maalouf
The author has combed the works of contemporary Arab chronicles of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants. He retells their story and offers insights into the historical forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.
Book
Abraham's Heirs
by Leonard B. Glick
Leonard B. Glick recounts the history of the Ashkenazic Jewish experience in medieval western Europe from the fifth to fifteenth centuries, focusing on interaction between Jews and Christians during this vital formative period. He demonstrates that Ashkenazic Jewish culture was profoundly shaped and conditioned by life in an overwhelmingly Christian society. Drawing on diverse Christian documents, he portrays Christian beliefs about medieval Jews and Judaism with a degree of detail seldom found in Jewish histories. Emphasizing social, political, and economic history, but also discussing religious topics, Glick describes the evolution of a complex, inherently unequal relationship. Because the Ashkenazic Jews of medieval Europe were ancestral to almost the entire Jewish population of eastern Europe, their historical experience played a major role in the heritage of most Jewish Americans.
Book
The Last Days of the Incas
by Kim MacQuarrie
Documents the epic conquest of the Inca Empire as well as the decades-long insurgency waged by the Incas against the Conquistadors, in a narrative history that is partially drawn from the storytelling traditions of the Peruvian Amazon Yora people. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
Book
Islam
by Karen Armstrong
No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war. In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of years of thinking and writing about the subject, Karen Armstrong’s short history demonstrates that the world’s fastest-growing faith is a much more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest.
Book
The Great Mortality
by John Kelly
La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.
