1 September 2005

Volume 2, Issue 1

Welcome back to World History To Go! The new school year means a fresh start with our second volume of World History To Go, a bimonthly newsletter designed to give you content to use in your world history classes, and to share suggestions for making best use of the award-winning Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History--and some new Berkshire publications in this area.

We hope you're as excited about this coming year as we are. It's a challenging time in the world at large, but what subject could be more appropriate and meaningful than world history? One thing we'll be doing in World History To Go is highlighting how current events echo the human experience of the past, and how we can look to the past for insight.

Please write to us. We're always pleasantly surprised when we receive feedback on our newsletters, and we would love to know how you are using the encyclopedia. By the way, our newest publication, Patterns of Global Terrorism is coming out later this month, and we're excited about the response it is getting from students and professionals alike.

How to Spell It

As we were completing work on the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, we began thinking about how often the spellings of key names, places, and terms have varied over time, not to mention how many actual country names have completely changed during the twentieth century alone. Those of us who had studied and lived through the years in which many of these changes occurred had trouble keeping up, so how could today's students be expected to know that "Bombay" was the same location as the current "Mumbai"--or that they might sometimes see Genghis Khan written as "Chingis," "Chinghiz," or "Chingiz" in various sources. So for good measure, we added a pronunciation guide.

Marcy Ross, an editor at Berkshire, put together this guide, which appears in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. We've been providing it to AP World History course leaders, and with the start of a new school year, we wanted our all our World History To Go teachers--and their students--to have this handy resource available in the classroom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Each time Berkshire Publishing Group sets to work on creating an encyclopedia, we review our guidelines on how we will present the names and terms that have changed in the course of history or through language alterations. We strive for consistency, though not the foolish kind against which Emerson warned.

Languages and geographic terms evolve regularly, and sometimes staying current means that we can’t be completely consistent. Adding to the challenge is the fact that words in languages not based on the Latin alphabet (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew) must be transliterated—spelled in the language of another alphabet or “romanized” into English. And even within a language, transliteration systems change. Many people who grew up knowing the Wade-Giles system of Chinese romanization (with such spellings as Peking and Mao Tsetung) had to become accustomed to seeing words using the pinyan romanization system introduced in the 1950s (with new spellings such as Beijing and Mao Zedong).

And How to Say It

• Istanbul (iss-tan-BULL): Constantinople, Byzantium
• Mesoamerica: Middle American, Central America
• Sri Lanka (shree LAN-ka): Ceylon
• Quran: Qur'an, Koran
• Timur (TEE-more): Timur Lenk, Tamerlane, Tamburlaine

"Though attempting to cover as broad a subject as world history in five volumes seems impossible, the editors and their contributors have pulled the feat off with aplomb. No article runs more than approximately 10 pages, but each captures the essence of the topic being addressed as well as the distinct style of the contributor.... As McNeill states in his preface, the title is 'designed to help both beginners and experts to sample the best contemporary efforts to make sense of the human past by connecting particular and local histories with larger patterns of world history.' The encyclopedia succeeds admirably and belongs on the shelves of all high-school, public, and academic libraries. In short: buy it. Now." --Booklist **Starred Review** and Editors’ Choice

• Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History
• Edited by W. H. McNeill, Jerry H. Bentley, David Christian, David Levinson, Heidi Roupp, and Judith P. Zinsser
• Five volumes, 2,500 pages, US$575
• ISBN: 0-9743091-0-9 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Online: BerkshireWorldHistory.com

Check out our World History and HCI gear for 2005!

We have some important topics lined up for our next issues. Global poverty, past and present. Terrorism in world history. And some fun things, too, like sports and the latest craze from Japan, Sudoku. Please send your ideas and suggestions along, any time.

With warm regards,
Karen Christensen
karen@berkshirepublishing.com
Berkshire Blog

"This pioneering Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History is designed to help both beginners and experts to sample the best contemporary efforts to make sense of the human past by connecting particular and local histories with larger patterns of world history."
--William H. McNeill, author of The Rise of the West and The Human Web