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The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century
Robert B. Marks · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same author1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Charles C. Mann · 631 pages
From the author of 1491 -- the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas -- a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher C
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
William Cronon · 530 pages
Argues that the American frontier and city developed together by focusing on Chicago and tracing its roots from Native American habitation to its transformation by white settlement and development.
Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World
Jack Weatherford · 280 pages
"As entertaining as it is thoughtful....Few contemporary writers have Weatherford's talent for making the deep sweep of history seem vital and immediate."THE WASHINGTON POSTAfter 500 years, the world's huge debt to the wisdom of the Indians of the Americas has finally been explored in all its vivid drama by anthropologist Jack Weatherford. He traces the crucial contributions made by the Indians to
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn · 702 pages
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Davis · 467 pages
Civilization: The West and the Rest
Niall Ferguson · 402 pages
What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications"?that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six thing
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan · 382 pages
"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations b
The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
Vijay Prashad · 374 pages
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond · 592 pages
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G
An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
Shashi Tharoor · 360 pages
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Sven Beckert · 640 pages
The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new m
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici · 285 pages
Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
Julian Sancton · 384 pages
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
David S. Landes · 650 pages
David S. Landes tells the long, fascinating story of wealth and power throughout the world: the creation of wealth, the paths of winners and losers, the rise and fall of nations. He studies history as a process, attempting to understand how the world's cultures lead to - or retard - economic and military success and material achievement. Countries of the West, Landes asserts, prospered early thro
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King
Rich Cohen · 270 pages
When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891, he was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, banana hauler, dockside hustler, and plantation owner. He battled and conquered the United Fruit Company, becoming a symbol of the best and w
The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000
John Tutino · 512 pages
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Daniel Immerwahr · 513 pages
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Eduardo Galeano · 338 pages
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan · 450 pages
What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as
The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River
Richard White · 130 pages
In The Organic Machine, Richard White, a distinguished historian and leading scholar of the American West, explores the intimate relationship between nature and mankind along the Columbia River. Working on the cutting edge of environmental and social history, White demonstrates how, over the centuries, both native peoples and settlers have continually remade the river, treating it as a machine des
A Green History of the World: The Environment & the Collapse of Great Civilizations
Clive Ponting · 432 pages
An examination of human history in terms of the environment explores how nature has affected the growth of human civilization and how human civilization has affected nature, from the earliest hunter-gatherer groups to the present.--
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Ira Katznelson · 713 pages
Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, this book finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Historian Ira Katznelson asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who saf