Dutch historian Rietbergen (Univ. of Nijmegen) offers a broad historical summary of European societal development over the last 5000 years. Religion gets very close attention, as do certain seminal developments: printing, gunpowder, migration from country to city, and industrialization. Interspersed excerpts from primary sources (Grotius, Chaucer, Michaelangelo) add some variety to the text, though not always gravity (Iron Maiden lyrics?). The final quarter of the book, dealing with the 20th century, turns more toward sociology with less convincing results?Rietbergen's prejudices (against the European Union, for instance) show through.

Over the last thirty years, postcolonial critiques of European imperial practices have transformed our understanding of colonial ideology, resistance, and cultural contact. The Enlightenment has played a complex but often unacknowledged role in this discussion, alternately reviled and venerated as the harbinger of colonial dominion and avatar of liberation, as target and shield, as shadow and light. This volume brings together two arenas - eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory - in order to interrogate the role and reputation of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions and postcolonial interrogations of Western imperial aspirations.

This is an excellent account of the life and thought of Rousseau. It shows how this master of self- dramatization revolutionized the European world of thought. The first great Romantic the obsessive searcher and promoter of himself was one of the major thinkers leading to the French and then American Revolutions. Orphaned from his mother as a small child he made his way from his native Geneva to the then center of civilization'in Paris. On the way he promoted ideas, ' the pristine state of nature' ' the corruption brought to mankind by civilization'( Man is born free and is everywhere in chains) ' the centrality of subjective feeling in understanding the world' ' the need for social equality in the education of women' 'the social contract' that changed European mankind's way of thinking about itself. Strathern tells the story of Rousseau's not particularly noble life ( he and his former washerwoman, later wife's five children were put out to foundling homes at infants) including the story of his unusual sexual journey with a great deal of humor and wisdom.
This is a good introduction to one of those truly rare people, one who actually did help change the course of history.

Though often misconstrued as a vanished successor to the classical world, Byzantium belongs in the mainstream history of Europe and the Mediterranean; its impact is still felt throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The tension between change and continuity in Byzantine society is one of the main themes explored in this book.

Combining current trends, academic theories, and historical insights, this travel guide brings both lesser-known and famous European spiritual locales into perspective by explaining the significance of each sacred site.