Encounters in World History is a collection of primary sources from the human past organized under the overarching theme of “encounters.” With the source materials structured in this way, the book makes it easy for students to analyze these texts in a meaningful comparative context. How, for example, did different cultures conceive of the relationship between humans and the divine? What constituted legitimate authority in different value systems? How did the relationship between t...

Encounters in World History is a collection of primary sources from the human past organized under the overarching theme of “encounters.” With the source materials structured in this way, the book makes it easy for students to analyze these texts in a meaningful comparative context. How, for example, did different cultures conceive of the relationship between humans and the divine? What constituted legitimate authority in different value systems? How did the relationship between t...

Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930) was born toward the beginning of Queen Victoria's long reign. At her death in 1901, he was a year away from becoming the first prime minister of the Edwardian era. In the quarter century after hisentry into political life in the 1870s, Britain experienced material changes and a sense of intensifying human interactions as dramatic to his generation as the forces of globalization are today. Aristocrats watched anxiously as gifted boys from the middle classes ...