Eyewitness History of the WorldEyewitness History of the World
What an exciting way to learn history! Instead of memorizing dates or lists of battles, you can click on a globe and a timeline, and see and hear history occurring. You can see the inside of a Faberge egg made for a Russian tsar, view a collection of bronzes from sixteenth-century Benin, watch an animation showing how the Mongols of Ghengis Khan's empire built a yurt, or listen to Adolf Hitler addressing a Nazi rally.
Dorling Kindersley Multimedia provides this engaging introduction to history with their new CD-ROM, Eyewitness History of the World. Like the other titles in the Eyewitness series, this CD-ROM features an imaginative interface that makes it easy and fun to find your way around. The program opens with a view into a crowded office, dominated by a world globe. You select a region of the world from the globe and a period of history from a timeline, and the program takes you to a map representing the main articles available for that region and period.
The main articles are laid out with striking graphics, a paragraph or two explaining the main points of the topic, and buttons taking you to additional details. For example, the article on the fall of communism has buttons leading to a brief article on Eastern Europe, a longer article (five paragraphs) on the civil war in Yugoslavia, and a video of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. There's also a button giving a list of related articles. Other articles have different selections, but there is always a multimedia element: a picture, a map, a recording of a speech, or a video.
There are other ways to find your way around all this information. There's an alphabetical list of all the articles, a separate list of the videos, and other lists for particular topics, like Everyday Life and Innovations. There's also a Game Master which lets you play a multiple choice game based on the information in the CD-ROM, and lets you look up answers by going to the appropriate article.
The CD-ROM really covers world history, with articles from all regions of the world and all periods of history. However, many of the topics are not covered in any depth. There's only one paragraph about the Korean War, and only about 15 paragraphs about World War I, hardly enough to thoroughly describe these topics. However, the article on World War I contains a diagram of a gas mask, a recording of a French soldier describing a poison gas attack, and a video with actual footage of trench warfare.
So this isn't a CD-ROM for doing research for a term paper, or for studying the history of a country before a business trip. This is a CD-ROM for browsing and exploring, for learning by chance. If you don't know a lot about history, you'll learn a lot from this CD. And if you do know your history, the illustrations and videos will show you a side of history you haven't seen before.
For PC: 386DX/33 MHz or faster PC, 4 MB
