Left, historian John E. Wills with an illustration from a book by the scientist Janez Valvasor showing the latter exploring underground channels below Cerknica Lake. Wills details Valvasor’s adventures in the book, “1688.” Writes Wills: “[Valvasor] was acutely aware of the dangers of dropoffs in the dark into huge sinkholes. An illustration makes his fears and ambivalences stunningly clear. É One of the two human figures in the foreground, pointing to the shapes, probably is Valvasor, observing a subterranean world that he would like to view naturalistically, but that still awakens fear and loathing.” The stalactites and stalagmites appear as devilish masks, monsters and body parts. Valvasor’s story is one of 80 vignettes that make the year 1688 come alive.

Photo by Irene Fertik

He initially leaned toward highlighting stories from 1687 or 1689, years that had their share of excitement and interesting tales.

But in the end, Wills couldn’t avoid it – he discovered that 1688 was packed with enough adventure for an entire decade, if not a century.

“I could have done something like this for any year in the 1680s,” Wills said. “I was hesitant to do 1688 because I feared the balance of the book would be swamped by the famous English ‘Glorious Revolution’ of that year and I would risk looking foolish as an outsider writing about an event that has been so much studied. But I discovered several other irresistible tales from 1688, and, in the end, the year was just too good to pass up.”

“1688: A Global History” takes readers on a journey that starts in Mexico with Juana Ines de la Cruz, a poet and nun who was raised in Mexican Creole society, and ends in London with Henry Purcell, the great composer, musician and organist of Westminster Abbey.

Some 80 vignettes are included in the book, which globe trots to nearly every continent and across every major body of water in the world. The then-rarely traveled Sonora Desert, Robben Island (off the Cape of Good Hope) and Zumbi’s kingdom of escaped slaves in Brazil are visited along with better-known parts of every continent.

While Wills, a professor of history in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, was familiar with some 1688 stories from his past research, other topics were newly discovered, including a number of stories he stumbled upon while traveling.

“The most amazing one came in 1995 while I was driving down a nice road east of Ljubljana [now the capital of Slovenia], and saw a marker pointing to a historic landmark,” Wills said. “As a rule, I follow all historic markers, so I made the turn. It turned out to be a country house, actually a small castle, of a Slovenian scholar named Janez Valvasor. It was complete with his library and laboratory.”

And at this house and library there were many 1688 connections.

For example, Valvasor spent 1688 working on the plates and proofreading four volumes entitled “The Honor of the Duchy of Carniola.” In that year he also published a Latin “Topography of the Archduchy of Carinthia.” In these publications, Valvasor reflects on an old Europe of witchcraft, pacts with the devil and subterranean forces. At the same time, Valvasor was an elected member of the Royal Society of London – the center of the new world of sciences and reason that had no place for witchcraft.

On another trip to Brussels in 1987, Wills came across the story of Father Vincenzo Coronelli. “I went to a conference on Ferdinand Verbiest SJ (whose funeral in Beijing is described in the book), and the conference group went to a Chinese history exhibit at one of the big museums,” Wills recalled. “And there in the central hall of the museum was this big globe, labeled as having been made by Coronelli in 1688. I wrote to an old friend from mission history circles who is a historian of cartography, and took it from there. I had never heard of Coronelli and his globes until I saw this one by chance in Brussels.”

One of Wills’ favorite stories from 1688 is about an English trading official in India named Elihu Yale and his odd link with a Chinese sea lord. Yale later gave some money to a struggling college in Connecticut, which agreed to change its name in his honor.

n 1994, Wills wrote “Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History,” which illuminates the Middle Kingdom over the last 5,000 years through selected biographies of political, intellectual, religious and artistic leaders. Some of that research laid the groundwork for “1688.”

Even before publishing “Mountain of Fame,” Wills dreamed of writing a book about a single year in time. “I had a germ of the idea about 20 years ago,” he said. “I liked the thought of taking a slice of time and holding it constant. So, I kept throwing stuff in a file from the 1680s.

“My detailed professional scholarship is on European relations with China in the late 1600s. Thus, I’ve had to learn a scattering of things about European history, about Europeans in other parts of Asia, and even about other parts of the world – Africa and the Americas – that were being linked by a web of shipping routes in those years.”

In addition to Chinese history, Wills has taught what was initially called the history of European expansion, then maritime history, and more recently the history of the early modern world. For years, he has assigned his draft of “1688” in his early modern world history course. “I have assigned the book, in pre-publication ‘course reader’ format, as one of the books in my History 440, Early Modern World His tory. It works very well in that setting,” Wills said.

When he finally settled on writing the book on 1688 he had to choose which stories to include. He narrowed the book down to 80 stories told in about 400 pages.

So far, “1688” has received wide acclaim in Great Britain, which doesn’t surprise Wills. “It seems clear that in settling on 1688, I stumbled into doing something that would help the book find an audience. It’s doing better in England than in the United States, I think, because the British people know about their 1688 and are intrigued by the idea of finding out what was happening around the world.”

“1688: A Global History” is published by W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. (January, 2001)