A reference guide to world history, featuring a timeline, key date boxes, and biographies of historical figures. This authoritative reference book brings world history to life, from early humans to the current war on terror. Along the way, it reveals riveting facts on the founding of the great Roman Empire, the revolution that changed France forever, the war between the North and South that unified America, the start of World War I and the Great Depression...

A history of the world is presented through over one hundred different visual timelines, from a chronology of the written word to an ordered listing of the American presidents.

Combines four previously published history atlases into one volume, covering the history of human civilization from the ancient world to the modern era and examining religion, exploration, war, colonization, kingdoms, and technology.

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game...