Western Civilization I-II. [antikvár]

PREFACE Revision of a textbook that covers the whole sweep of Western history, from the Stone age to the present, provides the author with a salutary, and even unnerving, reminder of the extraordinary ferment that continues to affect the research and writing of history. The "new history," using innovative techniques derived from the social sciences and exploiting new forms of source material, now dominates economic, urban, and demographic studies. The computer has become an increasingly familiar tool, making possible a new kind of scientific history, especially in the handling of data so massive that an individual or even a research group could never previously have undertaken to make sense of them. New concerns, especially the desire to understand and to make visible in historical perspective groups other than dominant political, economic, and cultural elites, have led to fruitful efforts to understand those who have left few written records. However, few fields have advanced so rapidly in such a short time as women's history. In the third edition of this text, published in 1981, I made a serious preliminary effort to incorporate much of the new writing on women within the perspective of the overall narrative. This fourth edition has benefitted from the large number of finely researched monographs and articles in women's history that have appeared since 1981 and from the equally significant progress in providing women's history with a framework or rationale within which present and future research can be organized. A principal goal in this new edition, therefore, was to extend and deepen the understanding of the experience of women within western civilization. For each historical period, I have considered the dichotomy between the public and private aspects of women's lives, because the extent to which women as a group or as individuals partake in the public, rather than only the private, life of their society determines the nature of their