In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim. In a retrospective essay titled "The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years," McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954-63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world's past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes. "This is not only the most learned and the most intelligent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind. . . . To read it is a great experience. It leaves echoes to reverberate, and seeds to germinate in the mind."—H. R. Trevor-Roper, New York Times Book Review

    The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules—for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.

    From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.

    His course on the history of civilization was extraordinary in its scope and in its impact on students.Like the course, The Evolution of Civilizations is a comprehensive and perceptive look at the factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations. Quigley examines the application of scientific method to the social sciences, then establishes his historical hypotheses. He poses a division of culture into six levels from the abstract to the more concrete. He then tests those hypotheses by a detailed analysis of five major civilizations: the Mesopotamian, the Canaanite, the Minoan, the classical, and the Western.Quigley defines a civilization as “a producing society with an instrument of expansion.” A civilization’s decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution—that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs.

    Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

    When Jacquest Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, launched an elaborate Inquisition to stamp them out, the peasants & shepherds he interrogated revealed, along with their position on official Catholicism, many details of their everyday life. Basing his absorbing study on these vivid, carefully recorded statements of peasants who lived more than 600 years ago--Pierre Clergue, the powerful village priest & shameless womanizer is even heard explaining his techniques of seduction--eminent historian Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the economy & social structure of the community & probes the most intimate aspects of medieval life: love & marriage, gestures & emotions, conversations & gossip, clans & factions, crime & violence, concepts of time & space, attitudes to the past, animals, magic & folklore, death & beliefs about the other world.

    So the Durants embarked on an encyclopedic survey of all civilization, ancient and modern, Occidental and Oriental. The books: Our Oriental Heritage (Volume 1): Will Durant opens his massive survey of civilized history with a sweeping look at the Orient: the Egyptians, who perfected monumental architecture, medicine and mummification; the Babylonians, who developed astronomy and physics; the Judeans, who preserved their culture in the immortal books of the Old Testament; and the Persians, who ruled the largest empire in recorded history before Rome.The Life of Greece (Volume 2): Will Durant's survey of ancient Greece shows us the origins of democracy and the political legacy to the Western world; the golden age of Athens, its architecture, poetry, drama, sculpture and Olympic contests; the blossoming of philosophical thought amid a society still rooted in slavery and barbarism; and the mysterious lost island of Crete, land of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Caesar and Christ (Volume 3): Spanning a millenium in Roman history, the third volume in the Durants' series shows us a world-conquering Roman army, undefeated, unafraid and...vegeterian; Hannibal, who transported an army of elephants over the Alps to invade Rome; Julius Caesar, who brought Western Europe under Roman rule; the life and Passion of Christ; and the struggle of the rising church. The Age of Faith (Volume 4): Over 1,000 years, we meet the Christian ascetics and martyrs, including Simeon Stylites, who sat atop a pillar for 30 years, exposed to rain, sun, and snow, and rejoiced as worms ate his rotting flesh; the saints, including Augustine, the most influential philosopher of his age; Mohammed, the desert merchant who founded a religion that conquered one-third of the known world in two centuries; and the Italian poet Dante, whose sensibility marks the transition to the Renaissance. The Renaissance (Volume 5): In this volume, Will Durant examines the economic seeds -- the growth of industry, the rise of banking families, the conflicts of labor and capital -- for Italy's emergence as the first nation to feel the awakening of the modern mind. He follows the cultural flowering from Florence to Milan to Verona and eventually to Rome, allowing us to witness a colorful pageant of princes, queens, poets, painters, sculptors and architects. We see humanity moved boldly from a finite world to an infinite one. The Reformation (Volume 6): In Europe's tumultuous emergence from the Middle Ages, we encounter two rival popes fighting for control of a corrupt, cynical church; the Hundred Years' War and 13-year-old warrior Joan of Arc; Christopher Columbus' accidental discovery of the New World; and Martin Luther, who defied the pope and ultimately led Northern Europe into the age of individualism. The Age of Reason Begins (Volume 7): In one of Europe's most turbulent centuries, Philip II of Spain sees his "invincible" armada suffer defeat at the hands of England; Elizabeth I of England receives assistance from explorer Walter Raleigh and pirate Francis Drake; and new appeals for reason and science are exemplified in the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes. The Age of Louis XIV (Volume 8): This installment is the biography of a period some consider the apex of modern European civilization. "Some centuries hence," Frederick the Great predicted to Voltaire, "they will translate the good authors of the time of Louis XIV as we translate those of the age of Pericles or Augustus." Those authors are lovingly treated here: Pascal and Fenelon, Racine and Boileau, Mme. de Sevigne and Mme. de La Fayette, and, above all, the philosopher-dramatist Moliere, exposing the vices and hypocrisies of the age. The Age of Voltaire (Volume 9): A biography of a great man and the period he embodied. We witness Voltaire's satiric work in the salons and the theater as well as his banishment to England. With him we view the complex relationships between nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie and peasantry in the France of Louis XV. We explore the music of Bach and the struggle between Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa of Austria. And finally we hear an imaginary discussion between Voltaire and Pope Benedict XIV on the significance and value of religion. Rousseau and Revolution (Volume 10): This volume ranges over a Europe in ferment, but centers on the passionate rebel-philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contended with Voltaire for the mind of Europe. Rousseau condemned civilization as a disease, glorified the noble savage, proclaimed to the world with equal intensity his own love affairs and the natural rights of man, and became the patron saint of the French Revolution and social upheavals across the globe for two centuries. The Age of Napoleon (Volume 11): The final volume. Napoleon is the archetypical hero, whose restless, ambitious, and intelligent mind dominated his age and has never ceased to fascinate the world he helped fashion. Yet even Bonaparte is dwarfed by the age that took his name. For, the Durants have re-created the life, the history, the arts, the science, the politics, the philosophy, the manners and the morality, the very spirit of the turbulent epoch that began with the French Revolution, ended with the fall of the emperor and ushered in the modern world.

    Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to shows how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.

    With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart.

    Why? This is the fascinating, disturbing question that bestselling author Karen Armstrong addresses in her brilliant new book The Battle for God. Writing with the broad perspective and deep understanding of human spirituality that won huge audiences for A History of God, Armstrong illuminates the spread of militant piety as a phenomenon peculiar to our moment in history.Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalism is not a throwback to some ancient form of religion but rather a response to the spiritual crisis of the modern world. As Armstrong argues, the collapse of a piety rooted in myth and cult during the Renaissance forced people of faith to grasp for new ways of being religious--and fundamentalism was born. Armstrong focuses here on three fundamentalist movements: Protestant fundamentalism in America, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran--exploring how each has developed its own unique way of combating the assaults of modernity.Blending history, sociology, and spirituality, The Battle for God is a compelling and compassionate study of a radical form of religious expression that is critically shaping the course of world history.

    This Harriman House edition includes Charles Mackay's account of the three infamous financial manias - John Law's Mississipi Scheme, the South Sea Bubble, and Tulipomania.Between the three of them, these historic episodes confirm that greed and fear have always been the driving forces of financial markets, and, furthermore, that being sensible and clever is no defence against the mesmeric allure of a popular craze with the wind behind it.In writing the history of the great financial manias, Charles Mackay proved himself a master chronicler of social as well as financial history. Blessed with a cast of characters that covered all the vices, gifted a passage of events which was inevitably heading for disaster, and with the benefit of hindsight, he produced a record that is at once a riveting thriller and absorbing historical document. A century and a half later, it is as vibrant and lurid as the day it was written.For modern-day investors, still reeling from the dotcom crash, the moral of the popular manias scarcely needs spelling out. When the next stock market bubble comes along, as it surely will, you are advised to recall the plight of some of the unfortunates on these pages, and avoid getting dragged under the wheels of the careering bandwagon yourself.

    He retells their story and offers insights into the historical forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.

    In a spirited and original contribution to this quickening discussion, two renowned historians, father and son, explore the webs that have drawn humans together in patterns of interaction and exchange, cooperation and competition, since earliest times. Whether small or large, loose or dense, these webs have provided the medium for the movement of ideas, goods, power, and money within and across cultures, societies, and nations. From the thin, localized webs that characterized agricultural communities twelve thousand years ago, through the denser, more interactive metropolitan webs that surrounded ancient Sumer, Athens, and Timbuktu, to the electrified global web that today envelops virtually the entire world in a maelstrom of cooperation and competition, J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill show human webs to be a key component of world history and a revealing framework of analysis. Avoiding any determinism, environmental or cultural, the McNeills give us a synthesizing picture of the big patterns of world history in a rich, open-ended, concise account.

    Zygmunt Bauman explores the silences found in debates about the Holocaust, and asks what the historical facts of the Holocaust tell us about the hidden capacities of present-day life. He finds great danger in such phenomena as the seductiveness of martyrdom; going to extremes in the name of safety; the insidious effects of tragic memory; and the efficient, "scientific" implementation of the death penalty. Bauman writes, "Once the problem of the guilt of the Holocaust perpetrators has been by and large settled . . . the one big remaining question is the innocence of all the rest, not the least the innocence of ourselves."Among the conditions that made the mass extermination of the Holocaust possible, according to Bauman, the most decisive factor was modernity itself. Bauman's provocative interpretation counters the tendency to reduce the Holocaust to an episode in Jewish history, or to one that cannot be repeated in the West precisely because of the progressive triumph of modern civilization. He demonstrates, rather, that we must understand the events of the Holocaust as deeply rooted in the very nature of modern society and in the central categories of modern social thought.

    From his vantage point at the break-up of the old regime, Kapuscinski gives us a compelling history of conspiracy, repression, fanatacism, and revolution.