This text is richly illustrated, beautifully designed, and engaging. It offers an exploration of Western and World civilization's cultural heritage. Students move chronologically through major periods and styles to gain insight into the achievements and ideas in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, philosophy, religion, and music. Divided into 13 chapters, Volume I provides students with a historical political, economic, and social framework to contextualize these achievements within a specific time and place, from prehistoric culture to the Renaissance time period. Timelines, maps, four-color and two-color illustrations, and a variety of unique “interrelationship” boxes help students make important interdisciplinary and cross-cultural connections, and help them relate the richness and meaning of the past to their own lives in the present.