Random House Compact Atlas of World History: Edited by Geoffrey Parker

by Geoffrey Parker

Using dynamic full-color maps accompanied by lucid, expertly written text, the Random House Compact Atlas of World History
is a vital work of reference and a fascinating companion for all those who seek to understand the past.

The brilliant maps and charts illustrate how world history unfolded through economic and political change, wars, exploration,
and the spread of religions.

From the emergence of humans two million years ago to the world today at the threshold of a new millennium, this fully
up-to-date edition covers all the major developments in the human story across every

         Part   The Ancient World (Human Origins through the Collapse of Ancient Rome and China)

         Part   The World Fragmented (the Spread of New Religions and Empires through to the end of the Fifteenth Century)

         Part   The Rise of the West (Sixteenth Century to the Eve of the First World War)

         Part   The Modern World (The Twentieth Century --History in Our Times)

Genres: History, Reference

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on the social, political and military history of early modern Europe, and in 2012 the Royal Dutch Academy recognized these achievements by awarding him its biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, and any period, from any country.

Parker has written or co-written thirty-nine books, including The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), winner of the 'best book prize' from both the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and also one of the three medals awarded in 2014 by the British Academy for ‘a landmark academic achievement… which has transformed understanding of a particular subject’.

Before moving to Ohio State in 1997, Parker taught at Cambridge and St Andrews universities in Britain, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, teaching courses on the Reformation, European history and military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed over thirty Doctoral Dissertations to completion, as well as several undergraduate theses. In 2006 he won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has four children. In 1987 he was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. His latest book is Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale University Press, 2014).

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of maps ... that’s why it’s an atlas. From the ancient world to the 1990s (the map of the world in the 1990s is about the international drug trade, which perhaps is revealing). But before that — so much history! It’s almost endless, all that history.