Historical World Atlas, Hammond

A great value. I had another historical atlas, but the print was too small. Very helpful and contains a lot of information for the price. Useful for cable TV fans who watch a lot of historical dramas or documentaries.

The Hammond Historical World Atlas gives me a handy tool to look up the boundaries of a country in various centuries. In essence, this book is a geographical tool for historical inquiries.

The Hammond Historical World Atlas is quite a bargain! It was just revised in 2007. I purchased one as a household reference/homework help, one for a friend who is a serious history buff (he can't put it down!), and one for my son's 4th-6th grade class. Everyone is very impressed with it. One of the big pluses of this atlas over other ones is that it includes a historical timeline of civilization around the world. You can trace what countries formed from others and the relative power of each at a given point in time. The atlas covers the spread of languages, religions, and trade at different periods as well as the historical maps. You can't go wrong with this atlas.

This is great for browsing (if you like maps of different periods in history that is). It won't stand on it's own as a history textbook, but I don't imagine it was intended to. I like the fact that it is lightweight and portable...not so big and fat that it's hard to find the page you're looking for, or a place to store it. I think it would be a great supplement for people who are learning history, as well as for those who read a lot of things from or about various periods in history. I keep it on the coffee table and enjoy looking through it often. I'm giving it only 4 stars because I'd like to see a few more details and features on the maps. Still, this really is a great bargain of an atlas.

Thank goodness I can still buy an atlas that is really an atlas. I read a lot of history, and having reached that stage in life where most of the books I enjoy are not profusely illustrated, I have been searching for a good historical atlas. I've bought several now, covering different periods and regions, but most have been a dissapointment (the lone exception being the Penguin Atlas of Medieval History). Instead of an atlas, i.e., a collection of maps, what I got was an illustrated history book. Unfortunately, to make room for the text, graphs, etc., they left out most of the maps. The maps that were included often ignored political boundaries, or tried to encapsulate 100 years of change on a single, low-detail map with a few arrows and dots drawn on. While I understand that history is much more than political and national boundaries, those are the aspects of history that change most rapidly, thus requiring more maps to follow. I remember the old Hammond Historical Atlas from my childhood, as the perfect companion for most books of post-Renaissance European history (and not bad for earlier periods, though usually weak outside Europe). I just hope it hasn't changed too much.