World Civilizations: The Global Experience, Combined Volume, 8th Edition, AP Edition © 2021

Peter N. Stearns is University Professor at George Mason University, where he regularly teaches a freshman world history course. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon, where he won the Robert Doherty Educational Leadership Award. He also founded and long edited the Journal of Social History. He has written widely in world history, including his most recent book, Time in World History. Other books address modern social and cultural history and include studies on gender, old age, work and emotion, including a recent title, Shame: A Brief History.

Michael Adas is the Abraham Voorhees Professor of History and a Board of Governors chair at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Over the past couple of decades his teaching has focused on courses dealing with European and American colonial expansion and African and Asian responses as well as global history in the twentieth century. In addition to texts on world history, Adas has written numerous books and articles on the impact of and resistance to Western colonialism and the importance of technology in those processes. His books include Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, which won the Dexter Prize in 1992, and more recently Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission. In 2012, he was awarded the Toynbee Prize for his lifetime contributions to global history and cross-cultural understanding. He is currently working on a comparative study of the ways in which British and American soldiers' responses to the wars of attrition in the trenches of World War I and in Vietnam contributed to the decline of each of these global powers.

Stuart B. Schwartz was born and educated in Springfield, Massachusetts, and then attended Middlebury College and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Latin American history. He taught for many years at the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty at Yale University in 1996. He has also taught in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Spain, France and Portugal. He is a specialist on the history of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil, and is the author of numerous books, notably Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), which won the Bolton Prize for the best book in Latin American History. He is also the author of Slaves, Peasants and Rebels (1992), Early Latin America (1983), and Victors and Vanquished (1999). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). For his work on Brazil, he was decorated by the Brazilian government. His book All Can Be Saved (2008) won the Bolton Prize as well as 3 awards from the American Historical Association.

Marc Jason Gilbert is the holder of the National Endowment for the Humanities Endowed Chair in World History at Hawai'i Pacific University in Honolulu, Hawaii. After receiving his Ph.D. from UCLA, he was for many years Co-Director of Programs in South and Southeast Asia for the University System of Georgia and was recognized by that System as a Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Teaching and Learning. He has benefited from various fellowships, which have enabled him to study in Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, India, Tanzania and Yemen. He has directed world history academic conferences and workshops for teachers in Cambodia and Vietnam. He is also a past President of the World History Association and the current editor of a WHA-affiliated journal, World History Connected. His publications explore the histories of India, Vietnam and global cultural exchange. His most recent work is Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History (2012), with Jon Thares Davidann.