Putting History To The Question

Covering dramatic works by Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and others--and reflecting upon subjects ranging from social attitudes towards racial difference and adultery to the politics of mercantilism and the hierarchy of master/servant relationships--the book reenergizes the discussion of Renaissance drama and history.

-- Garrett A. Sullivan, Shakespeare Quarterly

Motivate your students to study history and social studies. When faced with an uninteresting part of their lesson, social studies students will sometimes say, ''When am ever I going to use this stuff?'' This book addresses this common lament by providing 50 lesson plans that demonstrate how the skills learned in social studies classes are used in a wide variety of jobs. This is more than just another careers book. These activities give your students the chance to interview actual working professionals who use social studies skills in their jobs whether they studied social science in college or not!

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions—the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next—are much rarer than we think.

CD-ROM contains: Four Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and interactive mapping exercises, some of which extend the scholarly material and addresses new issues related to historical GIS.