Since the fourth edition was published, I have retired after forty-one years of teaching at Whittier College. Although I no longer have students with whom to try out ideas and draft revisions, I do remain an active scholar.
This shows why he is a source that we can trust. It also demonstrates that everyone can always keep on learning and improving.
it is to point out that history is living and relevant to current concerns, not the “dead hand of the past,” as some might see i
It is important to consider new world events that happen in old history textbooks because history is not just memorizing dates from the past, it is also applies to what is happening today.
Elsewhere in the book, I have clarified my prose where needed, corrected a few errors,
This shows that all historians can make mistakes and nobody is perfect in their work.
Since then, earthshaking events, including the COVID-19 epidemic (2019–2023), Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the latest assessments of the growing dangers of global warming, led me to conclude that a new edition was necessary to place those developments into the long-term global context of Origins.
It is interesting to see how recent world events make an author and historian revise and add new perspective to their work.