Showing titles in Civilization

For hundreds of years, the history of the conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztecs has been told in the words of the Spanish victors. Miguel León-Portilla has long been at the forefront of expanding that history to include the voices of indigenous peoples. In this new and updated edition...

A Times History Book of the Year 2022 A TLS Book of the Year 2022 ‘Exhilarating and whip-smart’ THE SUNDAY TIMES From award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in sixteenth-century Portugal. A History of Water follows the interconnected...

From pop culture and politics to tourism and heritage, and from the Jazz Age to the climate crisis, it's impossible to imagine the twentieth century without the discovery of Tutankhamun - yet so much of the story remains untold. Here, for the first time, Christina Riggs weaves compelling historical analysis with tales of lives touched by an encounter with Tutankhamun, including her own. Treasured offers a bold new history of the young pharaoh who has as much to tell us about our world as his own.

Red is a brilliantly told, captivating history of red hair throughout the ages. A book that breaks new ground, dispels myths, and reinforces the special nature of being a redhead, with a look at multiple disciplines, including science, religion, politics, feminism and sexuality, literature, and...

Anschaulich und lebensnah erzählt Ronald D. Gerste von den umwälzenden Ereignissen zwischen 1840 und 1914, in der die Medizin ungeahnte Fortschritte machte. Mit der Entdeckung der Antisepsis und der Entwicklung der Anästhesie und der Röntgenstrahlung wurden Heilungserfolge möglich, an die bisher nicht zu denken war. Forscher, Ärzte und Mediziner von Robert Koch bis Wilhelm C. Röntgen begründeten die moderne Medizin.

'Neima’s book, impeccably researched and beautifully written, will be an inspiration for anyone looking to an alternative future today.' - Stella Tillyard, author of Aristocrats and The Great Level 'Deeply interesting and a pleasure to read, The Utopians illuminates the history of “social...

Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Deutschen Wirtschaftsbuchpreis 2024 und als Wissensbuch des Jahres 2024. Sand, Eisen, Salz, Öl, Kupfer und Lithium: Diese auf den ersten Blick unscheinbaren, aber magischen Materialien haben über das Schicksal und den Wohlstand von Imperien entschieden, Zivilisationen hervorgebracht und zerstört sowie unsere Gier und unseren Erfindungsreichtum über Jahrtausende hinweg genährt. Doch die Geschichte dieser unbesungenen Helden ist noch lange nicht zu Ende erzählt, der Kampf um ihre Kontrolle wird unsere Zukunft maßgeblich bestimmen.

One of the world's leading anthropologists reveals how our evolutionary past informed the birth and rise of global civilisation. Unveiling a visionary new way of studying human history - one that stunningly weaves together experimental psychology, anthropology and quantitative social science - Harvey Whitehouse uncovers the three evolutionary biases that shape our social behaviour: conformism, religiosity and tribalism.

The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene. Until very recently, we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human effects of climate variability, Brian Fagan shows how climate functioned as what the historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the “deeper transformations” of history—a more important historical factor than we understand.

In 1621, 57 women undertook a three-month journey to Jamestown after responding to an advert placed by the Virginia Company, looking for wives for its tobacco planters in the New Colony. They travelled of their own free will, but the Company was effectively selling them at a profit, having set a bride price of 150lbs of tobacco for each woman. But what did the women want? Why did they make the perilous Atlantic crossing to a dangerous land, where six out of seven European settlers died within a few years?

The Pleistocene spans a period from around 2.5 million years ago (mya) to just over 12,000 years ago, and it was an epoch of enormous change on Earth, mainly characterized by climate changes involving fluctuations between periods of extreme heat and long periods of glaciation. This period is commonly known as the Ice Age, despite the fact there were actually a number of separate periods of cold. The Pleistocene Era: The History of the Ice Age and the Dawn of Modern Humans looks at the development of the era, what life on Earth was like, and the origins of archaic humans.

Brought to you by Penguin. We all know what it means to be ‘stoical’: to have a stiff upper lip, to hide or suppress one’s emotions, to be indifferent to the outside world. Many people might reasonably think that this doesn’t sound like a good way to live. Who would want to feel nothing?...

Past and present civilizations failed and fail for many reasons, but the number-one predictor of a civilization’s survival is its sense of religion—or lack thereof. So argues David Goldman in How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too). The strength of a civilization’s religion affects its purpose, its fertility rate, and ultimately, its fate, says Goldman—who then argues that, contrary to popular belief, Islamic countries are in the last throes of death while Christian America is in a position to flourish.

Julius Caesar, Lucretia, Cincinnatus, Augustus, the Gracchi brothers: Roman figures have had an extraordinary influence on modern republics from America to France. Here historian Jamie Gianoutsos traces the Roman republic and its afterlives through the revolutionary birth of modern republics in...

Duty bound to save the Empire from falling further under a tyrannical usurper, Cursor resolves to unravel the conspiracy and bring the perpetrators to justice. Aiding him is an old friend; a retired Master Centurion named Gaius Calvinus. Regrettably, they know that if successful, Tiberius' retribution will be swift and brutal, sparing neither the innocent nor the guilty. This leaves only two dark paths for Cursor and Calvinus; either allow the pending reign of terror under a ruthless usurper, or unleash the unholy vengeance of an emperor betrayed.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

A detailed look into ancient advanced technology, science, and medicine--some of which has yet to be reproduced today Explores countless examples of ancient high tech, including robotics, artificial intelligence, aircraft, solar-powered cannons, high-speed drills, illuminated underground...

Discover the remarkable history of the Fall of the Roman Empire... At its height, the Roman Empire was the largest and most powerful empire ever seen in the Western world. It covered 2 million square miles (5 million square kilometers) of territory, where a population of over 80 million was protected by a disciplined, well-trained army of almost half a million troops. By the third century, the empire had become so vast that it was effectively divided into two parts: the Western Empire, including the city of Rome, and an Eastern Empire governed from the city of Nicomedia in present-day Turkey.

Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem...