Landmarks in Humanities Fifth Edition by Gloria Fiero

All travelers appreciate a personal guide. For humanities students, LANDMARKS provides a 
chronological journey through the history of culture in one semester. Focusing on prominent 
landmarks from prehistory to the present, LANDMARKS introduces students to the creative endeavors 
of the human imagination and to the prominent ideas and issues that have shaped the course and character 
of the world’s cultures. The landmarks that mark this journey are the great works of their place and time; 
they have been transmitted from generation to generation as a living legacy. Understanding that a global 
humanities course is taught in varying ways, Gloria Fiero redefines the discipline for greater flexibility 
via a variety of personalized digital tools that meet and refine your teaching goals in less time. Enhanced 
by McGraw-Hill Education’s SmartBook 2.0, Fiero delivers a learning experience tailored to the needs of each institution, 
instructor, and student. With the ability to incorporate new extended readings, streaming music, and artwork, LANDMARKS 
renews the understanding of the relationship between world cultures and humankind’s creative legacy.

LANDMARKS is unique in several ways:

-It is interdisciplinary: it explores the interrelationship of various modes of expression - art, music, 
literature - as they work to create, define, and reflect the unique culture of a given time and place.

-It is thematic: each chapter advances a key idea, presented in the chapter title and explained in the 
introductory paragraph. The key idea offers a context for individual landmarks as they unfold chronologically. 
For instance, Chapter 1 (“Origins: The First Civilizations”) surveys our earliest cultures, emphasizing human 
strategies for survival and communal life; 
Chapter 14 (“Modernism: The Assault on Tradition”) considers the radical rejection of conventional values 
and styles that revolutionized early twentieth-century culture.

-It is selective: some landmarks have been chosen for their universality, some for their singular beauty, 
and some for their iconic or symbolic value. Certain landmarks - the Statue of Liberty, the Mona Lisa, 
the sonnets of Shakespeare - meet more than one of these criteria. The author’s choice of landmarks may 
differ from those of other individuals, and readers may wish to add landmarks of their own.