Section Review Questions
1. History’s Story
There's Method: How do historians study and divide up the past?
What Is Truth?: How can we evaluate history?
2. Wanderers and Settlers: The Ancient Middle East to 400 B.C.
The Apes' Cousins: What important cultural survival techniques did our hunter-gatherer ancestors use in the Old Stone Age?
Bound to the Soil: What did agriculture cultivate as the key components of civilization?
The Price of Civilization: What often-ignored problems did civilization create?
The Rise and all of Practically All Middle Eastern Empires: What did various Middle Eastern civilizations offer to the early peoples of the West?
3. The Chosen People: Hebrews and Jews, from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 135
An Obscure History/Between and under Empires: How did the history of the Hebrews/Jews contrast with that of other ancient peoples?
The Ties that Bind/Bound by Law: How did the Jews maintain their cultural identity?
4. Trial of the Hellenes: The Ancient Greeks, 1200 B.C. to A.D. 146
To the Sea: How did the Greeks begin as a people and expand through the Mediterranean?
The Political Animal: How did the Greeks attain degrees of democratic politics?
Metamorphosis: How did the Greeks enter a brief Golden Age, and how did it collapse?
The Cultural Conquest: What Greek culture expanded through the ancient West?
5. Imperium Romanum: The Romans, 753 B.C. to A.D. 300
World Conquest in Self-defense: How did Rome grow from a small city-state to a vast multicultural empire?
The Price of Power: How did Rome’s conquests end in a long civil war? In other words, how did imperial success lead to political failure?
The Absolutist Solution: How did key rulers establish order within the Roman Empire?
The Roads to Knowledge: How did the Romans bring together the cultural heritage of classical antiquity?
6. The Revolutionary Rabbi: Christianity, the Roman Empire, and Islam, 4 B.C. to A.D. 1453
The Son of Man: How did the new religion of Christianity begin and define itself?
The Cultural War: How did conflicts among the Jews, Christians, and pagans lead to the Romans creating a new cultural landscape?
Roma Delenda Est: How did the Roman Empire fall in the west, yet not in the east?
The Struggle for the Realm of Submission: How did Islam rise as a rival civilization?
7. From Old Rome to the New West: The Early Middle Ages, A.D. 500 to 1000
Goths in the Garden: How did German rule combine with the Roman heritage in the West?
Charles in Charge: How did the Carolingian family rise and fall?
The Cavalry to the Rescue: How did feudal politics and manorial economics help the West recover?
8. The Medieval Mêlée: The High and Later Middle Ages, 1000 to 1500
Return of the Kings: How did more centralized governments form in western Europe?
Discipline and Domination: How did reforms of monks lead to a reform of the wider Church and the creation
of the medieval papacy?
Plenty of Papal Power: How did the popes fight with kings and other religious movements?
The Age of Faith and Reason: How did medieval culture reflect both religion and rationalism?
A New Estate: How did the revival of trade and towns change the West?
Not the End of the World: How do the Later Middle Ages expose the problems of medieval institutions?
9. Making the Modern World: The Renaissance and Reformation, 1400 to 1648
The Purse of Princes: How did late medieval monarchs concentrate still more power?
Man as the Measure: How did the Renaissance promote the West’s transition into modernity?
Heaven Knows: On what issues did the different Protestants carry out their reforms?
Fatal Beliefs: How did Early Modern reforms among Christians culminate in wars over religion?
God, Greed, and Glory: How did the ‘‘voyages of discovery’’ begin colonial imperialism by Europeans?
10. Liberation of Mind and Body: Early Modern Europe, 1543 to 1815
Lost in the Stars: How did the Scientific Revolution change traditional views about nature?
From the Salons to the Streets: What improvements did Enlightenment thinkers propose for human society?
The State is He (or She): How did absolutism gain ascendancy in Early Modern Europe?
(Prosperous) People Power: How did democratic forms of government spread in the Early Modern West?
The Declaration of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity: How did the revolutionaries in France execute political changes?
Blood and Empires: How did war alter the French Revolution and cause Napoleon’s rise and fall?
11. Mastery of the Machine: The Industrial Revolution, 1764 to 1914
Facts of Factories: How did inventions and capitalism produce the Industrial Revolution?
Life in the Big City: How did urbanization develop a modern society?
Cleaning Up the Mess: How did competing political ideologies offer alternatives in the nineteenth
century?
For the Workers: How did socialists address problems manufactured by the Industrial Revolution?
The Machinery of Nature: How did modern science generate new and unsettling knowledge?
12. The Westerner’s Burden: Imperialism and Nationalism, 1810 to 1918
“New and Improved” Imperialism: How did the Europeans come to dominate Africa and Asia?
From Sea to Shining Sea: How did the United States of America become a world power?
Nationalism’s Curse: How did various nationalisms unify and divide Western nations?
The Balkan Cauldron: How did nationalism and the decline of the Ottoman Empire create instability in the Balkans?
The Great War: What made World War I more destructive and transformative than all previous wars?
13. Rejections of Democracy: The InterWar Years and World War II, 1917 to 1945
Decline of the West?: How did the West suffer cultural confusion in the wake of war?
Russians in Revolt: How did the Bolsheviks establish a new kind of state and society?
Losing their Grip: How were the Western Empires slowly weakening?
Fascist Fury: How did fascism spread across the West?
Hitler’s Hatreds: How did Hitler rise to power and change Germany?
The Roads to Global War: How did the German and Japanese desire for world empires shape World War II?
14. A World Divided: The Early Cold War, 1945 to 1980
From Friends to Foes: How did the winning alliance of World War II split into the mutual hostility of the Cold War?
Making Money: How did the postwar economic growth produce unprecedented prosperity and cultural change?
To the Brink, Again and Again: How was the Cold War fought in the West and around the world?
Letting Go and Holding On: How did the decolonization of Africa and Asia succeed yet force choices between Communist or Third World status?
American Hegemony: How was Latin America entangled in the Cold War?
The Uneasy Understanding: How did the policies of détente ease Cold War tensions?
The Walls Come Down: How did the Cold War come to an end?
15. Into the Future: The Contemporary Era, 1980 to the Present
Searching for Stability: How did the European Union attempt to provide a new economic and political
basis separate from the United States?
An Unexpected Revival: How did nationalism resurge after the Cold War?
Haves and Cannots: How did Western economic practices dominate world trade?
Values of Violence: How did Western and non-Western societies use violence to achieve political and cultural ends?
The Walls Go Up Again: What tensions and attitudes have weakened the unity of the Western alliances?
The Equivalent of War: How did the COVID pandemic, the Russian attack on Ukraine, and disputes about truth and facts expose weaknesses in Western civilization?
Epilogue: Why Western Civilization?: How should one shape one’s own worldview by picking and choosing from the key legacies of Western civilization?
