A groundbreaking look at Western and Eastern social development from the end of the ice age to todayIn the past thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization...

From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, revolutions in theory, politics, and cultural experimentation swept around the world. These changes had as great a transformative impact on the right as on the left. A touchstone for activists, artists, and...

Carlo Ginzburg considers how we assign historical context to events.More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays...

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas." When the fleet returned home in October 1423, the emperor had...

"An enthralling and profoundly humane book that every civilized person should read." --The Wall Street Journal The blockbuster New York Times bestseller and the companion volume to the wildly popular radio seriesWhen did people first start to wear...

A majestic narrative reckoning with the forces that have shaped the nature and destiny of the world’s governing institutionsThe story of global cooperation is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But...

Connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millennia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. In this brilliant and expansive book, David Abulafia offers a...

The ancient Near East is known as the "cradle of civilization" - and for good reason. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia were home to an extraordinarily rich and successful culture. Indeed, it was a time and place of earth-shaking changes for humankind:...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the riveting story of the war in North Africa. The...

In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires...

A compelling framework for understanding the importance of the 1970s for America and the worldThe 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen...

Diaspora is an important concept in history, sociology, religious studies, ethnic studies, political science, and literary criticism, among other disciplines. Meanwhile, journalists, politicians, and cultural authorities use the term with increasing...

"Ideas crackle" in this triumphant final book of Tony Judt, taking readers on "a wild ride through the ideological currents and shoals of 20th century thought.” (Los Angeles Times)One of our most brilliant historians, Tony Judt brings the past century...

Between the Second World War and the early 1970s, political leaders, activists, citizens, protestors. and freedom fighters triggered a human rights revolution in world affairs. Stimulated particularly by the horrors of the crimes against humanity in the...

Monarchies 1000 –2000 surveys a form of government whose legitimacy rests not on voluntary consensus but on age-old custom, heredity and/or religious sanction. Global in scope and comparative in approach, W. M. Spellman's survey establishes connections...

The history of animals and humans as seen through barbed wire.In this original and controversial book, historian and philosopher Reviel Netz explores the development of a controlling and pain-inducing technology—barbed wire. Surveying its development...

J.M. Roberts's renowned History of the World is widely considered the finest available one volume survey of the major events, developments, and personalities of the known past, offering generations of readers a tour of the vast landscape of human history...

From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works grew from complex early-modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. Anthony Grafton's...

The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century familyThey were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of...

Fought on what to Westerners was a remote peninsula in northeast Asia, the Korean War was a defining moment of the Cold War. It militarized a conflict that previously had been largely political and economic. And it solidified a series of divisions--of...