Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Identify bacterial diseases that caused historically important plagues and epidemicsDescribe the link between biofilms and foodborne diseasesExplain how overuse of antibiotic may be creating “super bugs”Explain the importance of MRSA with respect to the problems of antibiotic resistance

This set of lessons looks at a variety of natural disasters from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to Hurricane Katrina in our too-recent memory, to fears of avian flu pandemics that haunt the future through the lens of economic analysis. The contexts were chosen to facilitate the teaching of economic reasoning principles not only in economics courses, but also in history and the other social studies disciplines. Each lesson addresses a question that reflects people's compassionate reaction to news of disaster and develops one or two key tools of economic analysis in answering that question. Case studies of past disasters provide real-world illustrations. Mandated content standards and testing have kicked 'current events' days from the social studies classroom calendar, transforming disasters from 'teachable moments' to curricular inconvenience. Using the economic way of thinking to sift through the chaos of natural disasters, however, reveals threads of uniformity running through the litany of horrors and devastation unique to each event. Once identified, the common features of past disasters form a template for analyzing 'the next one,' allowing teachers to quickly incorporate today's unexpected news into the planned curriculum outline.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the European societies that engaged in conversion, conquest, and commerceDiscuss the motives for and mechanisms of early European exploration

 U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.Senior Contributing AuthorsP. Scott Corbett, Ventura CollegeVolker Janssen, California State University, FullertonJohn M. Lund, Keene State CollegeTodd Pfannestiel, Clarion UniversityPaul Vickery, Oral Roberts UniversitySylvie Waskiewicz

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the European societies that engaged in conversion, conquest, and commerceDiscuss the motives for and mechanisms of early European exploration