William J. Duiker is liberal arts professor emeritus of East Asian studies at The Pennsylvania State University. A former U.S. diplomat with service in Taiwan, South Vietnam and Washington, D.C., he received his doctorate in Far Eastern history from Georgetown University in 1968, where his dissertation dealt with the Chinese educator and reformer Cai Yuanpei. At Penn State, he has written extensively on the history of Vietnam and modern China, including the highly acclaimed COMMUNIST ROAD TO POWER IN VIETNAM (revised edition, Westview Press, 1996), which was selected for a Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award in 1982–1983 and 1996–1997. Other recent books are THE RISE OF NATIONALISM IN VIETNAM, 1900–1941 (Cornell, 1976), CHINA AND VIETNAM: THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT (Berkeley, 1987), U.S. CONTAINMENT POLICY AND THE CONFLICT IN INDOCHINA (Stanford, 1995), SACRED WAR: NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION IN A DIVIDED VIETNAM (McGraw-Hill, 1995) and HO CHI MINH (Hyperion, 2000), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. While his research specialization is in the field of nationalism and Asian revolutions, his intellectual interests are considerably more diverse. He has traveled widely and has taught courses on the history of communism and non-Western civilizations at Penn State, where he was awarded a Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the spring of 1996. In 2002, the College of Liberal Arts honored him with an Emeritus Distinction Award.

• Part I: THE ANCIENT WORLD (3,000 BCE–200 CE).l. The First Civilizations.2. Greece and Rome in Antiquity.3. Ancient China.Part II: NEW PATTERNS OF CIVILIZATION (300–1500 CE).4. The Americas before Columbus.5. The Making of Christian Europe.6. Ferment in the Middle East.7. Early Civilizations in Africa.8. The Indianized World.9. The Flowering of East Asia.Part III: NEW ENCOUNTERS (1500–1800 CE).10. The Creation of a World Market.11. Early Modern Europe.12. Asian Civilizations under Challenge.Part IV: AN AGE OF MODERNITY (1800–1945).13. The West enters the Industrial Age.14.High Tide of Imperialism.15. War and Revolution (1900–1920).16. The Coming of World War II.Part V: TOWARD A GLOBAL CIVILIZATION (1945–present).17. The Cold War.18. Contemporary Society in the West.19. The Challenge of Modernity in Africa and the Middle East.20. Asia Rising.