Traditions and Encounters, Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1500, Second Edition

Jerry H. Bentley is professor of history at the University of Hawai`i and editor of the Journal of World History. He has written extensively on the cultural history of early modern Europe and on cross-cultural interactions in world history. His research on the religious, moral, and political writings of the Renaissance led to the publication of Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (1983) and Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (1987). His more recent research has concentrated on global history and particularly on processes of cross-cultural interaction. His book Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (1993) studies processes of cultural exchange and religious conversion before modern times, and his pamphlet Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (1996) discusses the historiography of world history. His current interests include processes of cross-cultural interaction and cultural exchange in modern times.

Herbert F. Ziegler is an associate professor of history at the University of Hawai`i. He has taught courses on world history for the last 19 years and is currently the director of the world history program at the University of Hawaii. For several years he also served as the book review editor of the Journal World History. His interest in twentieth-century European social and political history led to the publication of Nazi Germany’s New Aristocracy (1990). He is at present working on a study that explores uncharted aspects of German society, especially the cultural manifestations of humor and satire in the Nazi era. His other current research project focuses on the application of complexity theory to a comparative study of societies and their internal dynamics.