The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, AP® Edition (Updated)

Richard W. Bulliet, Ph.D., (Harvard University) is emeritus professor of Middle Eastern history at Columbia University. He has written scholarly works on a number of topics: the social and economic history of medieval Iran (The Patricians of Nishapur; Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran), the history of human-animal relations (The Camel and the Wheel; Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers), the process of conversion to Islam (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period), transportation history (The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions), and the overall course of Islamic social history (Islam: The View From the Edge; The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization). He is the editor of the Columbia History of the Twentieth Century. He has published six novels and coedited The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East. He was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and was named a Carnegie Corporation Scholar.

Pamela Kyle Crossley, Ph.D., received her doctorate in modern Chinese history from Yale University. She is currently the Robert and Barbara Black Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her books include The Wobbling Pivot: An Interpretive History of China Since 1800; What is Global History?; A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology; The Manchus; Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World; and (with Lynn Hollen Lees and John W. Servos) Global Society: The World Since 1900.

Daniel R. Headrick, Ph.D., received his doctorate in history from Princeton University. Professor emeritus of history and social science at Roosevelt University in Chicago, he is the author of several books on the history of technology, imperialism and international relations, including The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century; The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism; The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics; Technology: A World History; Power Over Peoples: Technology, Environments and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present; and When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850. His articles have appeared in the Journal of World History and the Journal of Modern History, and he has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Steven W. Hirsch, Ph.D., has a doctorate in classics from Stanford University and is currently associate professor of classics and history at Tufts University. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy. His research and publications include The Friendship of the Barbarians: Xenophon and the Persian Empire, as well as articles and reviews in the Classical Journal, the American Journal of Philology, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. He is currently working on a comparative study of ancient Mediterranean and Chinese civilizations.

Professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Lyman L. Johnson, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in Latin American history from the University of Connecticut. A two-time senior Fulbright-Hays lecturer, he also has received fellowships from the Tinker Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. His recent books include Death, Dismemberment, and Memory; The Faces of Honor (with Sonya Lipsett-Rivera); The Problem of Order in Changing Societies; Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (with Enrique Tandeter); and Colonial Latin America (with Mark A. Burkholder). He also has published in journals, including the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, the International Review of Social History, Social History, and Desarrollo Economico. He recently served as president of the Conference on Latin American History.

Professor of history at Boston College, David Northrup, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in African and European history from the University of California at Los Angeles. He earlier taught in Nigeria with the Peace Corps and at Tuskegee Institute. Research supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council led to publications concerning pre-colonial Nigeria, the Congo (1870–1940), the Atlantic slave trade, and Asian, African and Pacific Islander indentured labor in the nineteenth century. A contributor to the Oxford History off the British Empire and to Blacks in the British Empire, his latest book is Africa's Discovery of Europe,1450–1850. In 2004 and 2005 he served as president of the World History Association.