Lynn Avery Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cultural history on such topics as gender. Her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2002.
I expected nothing more than a condensed textbook on the history of the development of Western civilization; as a History major, this was a required textbook for one of the History courses I was taking. Some chapters were just an absolute snooze fest; their understanding on religion is greatly flawed and tries to push the students to believe their narrative--especially on Judaism and Christianity (the historians' incorrect narratives on these main religions saddened me; they've left out SO much, explained so little and used superficial similarities to 'prove' their case on different religions which, frankly, proved nothing but lack of poor scholarship). One thing I absolutely enjoyed reading about, however, was Ancient Greece, the Republic of Rome, the Roman Empire, and the Medieval Ages. Afterwards, the rest of the chapters seemed rushed. I did not read the last two chapters of the textbook seeing as it was about the establishment of slavery in the Americas, a course of which I took.