The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

Susan Wise Bauer

Mar 2007 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own.

This is the first volume in a bold series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history.

Dozens of maps provide a clear geography of great events, while timelines give the reader an ongoing sense of the passage of years and cultural interconnection. This old-fashioned narrative history employs the methods of “history from beneath”—literature, epic traditions, private letters and accounts—to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled. The result is an engrossing tapestry of human behavior from which we may draw conclusions about the direction of world events and the causes behind them.

Ratings and reviews

I really liked the way information was presented in this book. The author focused on major civilizations in sensible time chunks. I especially appreciated the occassional timelines that showed 2 civilizations in parallel.

I love her history books so very much,my only question is why she did not do a volume four since Ottomons conqured Byzantines to our times,other then that her history books are awesomely written

good app

About the author

Susan Wise Bauer is an educator and academic who has worked with parents and students for more than twenty years. She taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for fifteen years. Her previous best-selling titles for Norton include The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, Rethinking School, The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, and the History of the World series