Mastering Modern World History

by Norman Lowe, John Traynor

The sixth edition of this bestselling book takes students on a journey through the 20th century and provides a clear overview of the key events which have shaped modern world history.

Unrivalled in its broad coverage,
- Surveys international relations and war , from 1900 to the present day
- Examines the rise and fall of fascism and communism around the globe
- Explores the international affairs of the major superpowers : the USA, Russia/USSR and China
- Assesses the experience of decolonization in India, Africa and Latin America
- Unpicks global issues , including economic crises and population increase

Chapters feature maps, diagrams and end-of-chapter questions to support and reinforce understanding. This new edition has been updated to take account of new scholarship, and provide a more global approach to key chapters in modern world history. Key changes
- New material on the Second World War, beginning with the outbreak of war between China and Japan, and touches upon Italy's campaigns in East and North Africa and Civil Wars taking place in China, Spain and the Ukraine
- Coverage of new historical interpretations of the events that led to the First World War
- New chapters on the history of the United States of America
- A new chapter on Tsar Nicholas II and the Russian Revolutions of 1917.


Mastering Modern World History is the go-to textbook for secondary school students and undergraduates studying modern world history and international relations, and an ideal companion for anyone with an interest in how the world got into its present state.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History, Reference, Academic, Politics, Education

720 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Emma Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

DEFINITELY the Best History book I've Ever read, in Clear and Simple Language.
EVERY Child in the World should read it!
I've Underlined 75% of it!

[Ali Hassan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a book that matches its name, Mastering Modern World History. I am not going to review the book because it is a lengthy book of more than 700 pages divided into various chapters. Each chapter talks about a different time period and different personalities as well. So I think it may be unfair if I fail to do justice with the review of the book. That's why I would simply like to comment on the book.
This book is awesome in many ways. Its language is simple. The writer used headings for making the material easy to comprehend for readers. The book is rich in knowledge and analysis of the events that happened in the Twentieth century. I would highly recommend this book to all who are interested in the politics of the world particularly in the political scenes of the previous century when a lot of changes happened in this world. This book is also the best option for the Pakistani students and candidates for the Civil Services of the country.

[The Conch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't think that reading modern world history could be enjoyed so much. In this book, the author describes event after event year wise. This book is fantastic source to go for the root of events. Highly recommended.

[Ajit Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book, if you want to know and understand the modern history, start from world war 1 till recent times......

[Anurag Vaishnav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Factual, comprehensive and unbiased.
What else could you need from a book on world history!

[Dmitry]

(The English review is placed beneath the Russian one)

По стилю книга больше всего напоминает Википедию, т.е. все главы или, лучше сказать, темы в этой книге очень короткие и поверхностные. Как мне кажется, для некоторых читателей главной ценностью этой книги стало какое-то особое внимание со стороны авторов к США, точнее к их внешней политике, которую авторы изображают как крайне агрессивную. Однако лично для меня бессмысленность этой книги состоит в том, что книга сама по себе очень поверхностная.

In terms of style, the book most resembles Wikipedia, i.e., all chapters or, better to say, topics in this book are very short and superficial. As it seems to me, for some readers the main value of this book was some special attention of the authors to the USA, more precisely to its foreign policy, which the authors portray as extremely aggressive. However, for me, the pointlessness of this book is that the book itself is very superficial.

[Arnab Padhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOT A FAN OF HISTORY, eh?? Well, then good news for you; this isn’t a history book, rather it is a book which analyses history. How did the world come to be as we know it? What events shaped the relations between nations? Why are some countries rivals while some are loyal to other even at the cost of world peace? Who were the people who influenced a nation and in the process the whole world? To answer all these you might have to read scores of books, but this will surely be the best you ever will read.
Sure it is voluminous, but that’s the best part. It equitably inks the history with perfect detail.

[Vikas Mandya · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic read it is. Beautifully summarizes all the hostilities in the 20th century. Do read conflict in the middle east and current world order chapters if you don't have time to go through all parts.

[Vikas Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

So this is the longest Book I have read till now. The audiobook length is 40 hours. It is treasure for those who are interested in question, how this present day world came to be. It talks about mostly about 20th century & current circumstances. It has a very good writing style. Sometimes I felt too overwhelmed by alot of data. But I think that is necessary. This book is now my pillar of global understanding. Anyone interested in topics like history, politics, economy, Geopolitics should pick this book. It is worth the investment.

[Yogesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always been intrigued by the events that led to WW 1 and WW 2. This book not only gave me insights about all the events but it gives an entire overview of the worldwide scenario and why certain countries are allies and aligned with each other.
How and why the International political scenario kept changing over the years precisely from 1900’s till 2013.

One of the BEST BOOKS i have ever read.

[Harshita Vyas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything about every important event of the modern history is covered here.
Just that, towards the end of the last chapter, its not all together a nice feeling, to know so much about how this world that we live in was shaped. The past was bleak and future is not very promising , unless we decide to actually apply all that so called knowledge that we claim to have acquired.

But, worth a read.

[Addy Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was thick, and the amount of information that this book has is insane. You can't just start and finish in a short time. You have to read it slowly, to fully grasp, and absorb all the important pieces of information. It's not less than a treasure for the lovers of politics, history, and all the students preparing for the competitive examination. This is a must-read book.

[Nithesh S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good summary of world history from world war I to 2010.

[Aniket Patil · Rating 5 out of 5]

information+ unbiased history made it place in my bookshelf.

[ANIRUDHA KUMAR · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book for beginners of world history from the 20th century. Would have been better if it had started from the fall of Constantinople.

[Rohan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is perhaps the most factual, comprehensive and unbiased look on the modern world history that shaped 20th century. A must read indeed!

[Nachikethas MJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took 2 years for me to complete this book. If this was the textbook during my school days I would have chosen History as my major!

[Hemen Kalita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book.
A little left leaning but still managed to incorporate views from all sides. Maps are detailed and very helpful.

[Gordhan Chaudhari · Rating 4 out of 5]

straight forward book.. clear n concise

[Mangi Mfunga · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best of the best world history book

[Nivan Bagchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave it 4 star because I felt Central Asia wasn't properly covered. Other than that, it's a brilliant book.

[Izza K · Rating 5 out of 5]

That one book that actually makes you fall in love with history (which is usually boring) & makes you want to know more. So well explained yet concise.

[Tarun Ranjan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholarly and authoritative work on world history.

Must read for anyone who wants to understand how the world got here

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book for an introduction to world history. It covers most of the important events to take place in the past century. Proves to be useful for students.

[Abhishek Gupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book details comprehensive facts about communist countries and modern world order, though it lacks details about indian history.

[Naman Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great Book as an introduction to how we are where we are in terms of Geopolitics, Nationals, macroeconomics of the world..

GOOD READ IMO

[Mohsinkinh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ooo

[Abhijit Gupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introductory cum refresher text on major incidents in the history of the world. Put in a point format, it allows the reader to understand major incidents in a concise manner.

[Tazar Oo · Rating 4 out of 5]

ေက်ာင္းသားသံုးပါ။ သမိုင္းပညာရွင္အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးရဲ႕ ကြဲလြဲခ်က္အခ်ဳိ႕ကိုလည္း ထည့္ေပးထားလုိ႔ တတ္ႏိုင္သေလာက္ ၾကားေနတဲ့ သမိုင္းလို႔ ဆိုႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ပထမ-ဒုတိယ ကမၻာစစ္၊ ကုလသမဂၢ၊ တ႐ုတ္၊ ႐ုရွ၊ အေမရိကန္သမၼတ အဆက္ဆက္၊ ကပ္စထရိုနဲ႔ က်ဴးဘား၊ တီတိုးနဲ႔ ယူဂိုဆလပ္ဗ္၊ အာဖရိကနဲ႔ အေရွ႕အလယ္ပိုင္း အာရပ္ကမၻာ၊ ၿပီးေတာ့ အစၥေရး၊ သိသင့္သိထိုက္တာမွန္သမွ် အၾကမ္းဖ်င္း အားလံုးပါတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းသံုးစာအုပ္ဆန္ေသာ္လည္း အလြန္စိတ္၀င္စားဖို႔ေကာင္းၿပီး (ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အေနနဲ႔ေတာ့) လက္ကမခ်ႏိုင္ဘူး။ သမိုင္းျဖစ္ရပ္တစ္ခုမွာ ဘယ္သူ႔ကိုအျပစ္တင္သင့္သလဲ (Who was to be blamed?) ဆိုတဲ့ ေခါင္းစဥ္ေအာက္က ျခံဳငံုသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ေတြကလည္း ေက်ာင္းသားေတြအတြက္ အရာ၀င္လွတယ္။ အေမးအေျဖေတြနဲ႔ ေလ့က်င့္ခန္း၊ ၿပီးေတာ့ ေခတ္အလိုက္ သတင္းစာမ်ားမွာ ပါခဲ့တဲ့ ကာတြန္းေလးေတြ၊ အကုန္ ႏွစ္သက္စရာေကာင္းတယ္။
အထူးစိတ္၀င္စားမိတာက တရုတ္ျပည္ႀကီးအေၾကာင္း၊ ရုရွားအေၾကာင္း၊ အေမရိကန္အေၾကာင္း။ သတိျပဳမိတဲ့ ထူးျခားခ်က္တစ္ခုက သံုးထားတဲ့ အဂၤလိပ္စာ အေရးအသားဟာ ရွင္းလင္းေျပျပစ္လွၿပီး ခပ္နိမ့္နိမ့္ေရးထားတာမ်ဳိးလည္း မဟုတ္ျပန္ဘူး။ (ဟုတ္ေသာ္ရွိမဟုတ္ေသာ္ရွိ) ေတာင္ေျပာေျမာက္ေျပာ စကားေျပာဖို႔ လိုအပ္တဲ့၊ ၀ါသနာပါတဲ့ လူေတြအတြက္ ဖတ္ကို ဖတ္ထားသင့္တဲ့စာအုပ္။ အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္ျပန္လည္ဖတ္႐ႈ၊ တိုက္ဆိုင္စဥ္းစား သင့္တဲ့ စာအုပ္။ ႀကီးႀကီးက်ယ္က်ယ္ေျပာရရင္ေတာ့ ရွိၿပီးသား ဉာဏ္ရည္ကို တစ္ဆင့္ထက္ျမွင့္ဖို႔ ဖတ္ထားရမယ့္ စာအုပ္။

[Shiva Gali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a total awesome book. The things that happened around the world and having international importance are presented in the book. You will find the opinions of so many historians including the author himself and so many aspects of looking at an even and it's history, why it has happened and what if it didn't happen. All the important facts behind an event are presented to make us understand more about the event. The cross references in the book are so good giving us so many details in less number of pages instead of repeating them again and again and skipping the content to save readers fatigue. If you read this book, you will understand the world and most the important character that are playing now in the world and their history till 2013. I find no alternative for this book. I like history and have read so many and I totally love this book from start to end. The language is so lucid and the presentation of facts with event headers, bullets and different presentation techniques makes it easily readable and understandable.