Amazon.com description: Product Description: THE ESSENTIAL WORLD HISTORY, Enhanced Third Edition, shows you how to use the maps, images, and documents in the book to give you an edge in your study of history. A brief introduction to the text -- "Studying from Primary Source Materials" -- reveals some of the tricks to uncovering the past that your instructor wants you to know. "Discovery" sections, at the end of every chapter, assist you in practicing these skills, which will help you connect the text's seven themes of world history and excel in your course. This bestselling text presents a balanced, highly readable overview of world history that explores common challenges and experiences uniting the human past and informing key global patterns over time. Thorough coverage of political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, cultural, and military history has been integrated into a chronologically ordered synthesis to help you gain an appreciation and understanding of the distinctive character and development of individual cultures. The text takes a global approach to world history, helping you link events together in a broad comparative framework and place the contemporary world in a more meaningful historical context.