“The First Crusade had just ended–and with it, an age.” This third history from Susan Wise Bauer takes us from the late middle ages to the conquest of Constantinople. Bauer tells us early on that this is not a history of the Renaissance, but simply uses the Renaissance as the time signature that the history comprises. There’s plenty to say about using a primarily European event (especially one that ushers in the height of European Imperialism) as the marker for a world history, but in […]

“On the morning of October 29, 312, the Roman soldier Constantine walked through the gates of Rome at the front of his army.” This is the second of the history books by Susan Wise Bauer that I’ve read now. Her approach is expansive, trying to cover huge sections of time and huge sections of geography in relatively short chapters. This obviously has limits, but the goal seems to be offering up a working sense of what was happening in the world in the given years, […]