The newest resource from the National Center of History in the Schools is World History: The Big Eras. This document deserves a place on the desk of every teacher of world history at the secondary school level, from middle schools to high schools to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. The essays featured in this teaching guide take students and teachers far beyond the superficial textbooks, dull standards, and specious themes and "big ideas" found in too many classrooms. Used in conjunction with the World History for Us All electronic resources, The Big Eras provides a rigorous, relevant, and compelling context in which to ponder the history of our world.

-- Kirk Ankeney
Principal, San Diego High School of International Studies
Former Chair, California History-Social Science Curriculum Framework Committee 

World History: The Big Eras tells a story of historical change at a grand spatial and temporal scale, and that makes it an invaluable resource for teachers and students. Absent such a big picture, teachers and students are forced to turn world history into one darn thing after another in one darn place after another. In crafting this era-by-era interpretation, Burke, Christian, and Dunn offer a valuable frame to support thinking and to help students make meaningful connections while also encouraging them to re-evaluate. I can think of no other resource as important to history teachers and students as World History: The Big Eras. It should be on every world history teacher's and every teacher-educator's reading list.

--Bob Bain
University of Michigan

By stripping the world’s past down into nine chronological eras in only ninety-one pages, A Compact History of Humankind encourages readers to conceptualize human history in its totality in one reading, rather than to build it piecemeal from thousands of historical details absorbed over long periods of time.

--Heather Streets-Salter
Washington State University

Books that are both intellectually engaging and guaranteed to command student attention are few and far between. Forbidden Love is one of those books. The topic itself is compelling, especially on today’s campuses where mixed-race students and mixed-race couples are becoming commonplace. But even more important, Forbidden Love shows students that this is no new phenomenon, but has been a hidden part of American social life from the nation’s earliest days. This alone will gain student attention, but Forbidden Love does much more. By reclaiming the long history of mixed-race encounters in America, Forbidden Love reveals a distinctively English-American form of mestizaje and métissage that has long been suppressed and denied. Beautifully written and always compelling, this book is made for today’s students and will truly enliven high school, college, and university classrooms. I urge you to give it a try.

-- Ron Schultz 
Professor and Graduate Coordinator 
University of Wyoming Department of History

Revolutionary fervor, patriotism, and heroism are not limited to one particular race, class or nation. After reading Nash and Hodges's account [Friends of Liberty] of the intersecting lives and ideas of Jefferson, Kosciuszko, and Hull, it is difficult to believe that anyone could have ever thought they were. This is a dazzling account of three colorful figures whose lives are emblematic of all the many-colored threads that run through the American tapestry, and whose lives were devoted to the service of the ideals that founded our nation.

--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University