#000655
A History of the Modern World, Sixth Edition
R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton
The survey textbook known to generations of students simply as "Palmer and Colton." R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton trace the making of the modern world from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Reformation, the age of revolutions, industrialization, the World Wars, and the Cold War, keeping Europe at the center while widening, in later editions, to the West's global impact. What made the book a classroom standard for half a century is its clarity and narrative sweep: it reads less like a reference and more like a coherent story of how the modern order came to be, argued with confidence and unusual grace for a textbook. This sixth edition, published by Knopf, belongs to that long line of revisions. Students of history, and general readers wanting a single authoritative overview of the modern era, have long found it the gold standard of its kind.
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The authors
R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was a distinguished historian of the French Revolution who taught at Princeton, Washington University, and Yale; his The Age of the Democratic Revolution won a Bancroft Prize. Joel Colton (1918–2011) taught at Duke for over four decades and specialized in twentieth-century France. Later editions added Lloyd Kramer as co-author.
The book
First published in 1950, A History of the Modern World became one of the most widely used college history texts in the English-speaking world, appearing in edition after edition (this is the sixth) under Knopf and later McGraw-Hill.
How it has aged
Its narrative power and command of European history remain admired, and the book is often praised as unusually readable for a textbook. Its traditional, Europe-centered framing has drawn criticism as survey history has broadened toward global and non-Western perspectives; newer editions and rival texts address that shift more fully. As a lucid account of modern Europe it still holds up.
For more context
Compare with more recent world-history surveys that decenter Europe for a sense of how the field has changed.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Place of publication
- New York
- Edition
- Sixth Edition
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado