Below is a link to Richard Bulliet, teaching a History of the World, the tenth sesson. It concerns a study he did on the growth of Islam. I think it is very cool. In research on Iranian geneologies, he finds a logistics curve that maps the spread from his geneological histories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjI4gHhDRSk
I've been through ten so far. He is not chasmatic, but if you are interested in the history of the development of world history as response to pressure from secondary school teachers and undergrad ed for a `multicultural' history to teach, instead of the older offering of Man and Western Civilization, you will find the first and part of the second lecture interesting. He continues this subtheme in other lectures as a running commentary of this course as to which things to put in and leave out in the text he co-authored. He isn't a marxist or really a social historian. He reveals a little too much interest in ideas, and not enough on other sides. He mentions Karl Jaspers, which worried me a little. I read Jasper's version of Spinoza and didn't like it much.
It's especially interesting if you watch somebody like Mark Lilla teach something from the core curriculum at Columbia, which is a combination of philosophy and literature---basically the great books theory of western history. You can then see the conflict.
Back in the day, I got a double dose, since Man and Western Civ was a general requirement, and two years of Art History, which covers the same sequence was a requirement, plus they added sections on China, Japan, and some smattering of Mexico and Peru.
CG