Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human...

An illustrated history of France, beginning in the pre-Roman times and continuing through the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994. Explores the political development of French society as well as issues of community, region, family, gender, and class.

""The American Dream" is one of the most familiar and resonant phrases in our national lexicon, so familiar that we seldom pause to ask its origin, its history, or what it actually means." "In this short history, Jim Cullen explores the meaning of the American Dream, or rather the several American Dreams that have both reflected and shaped American identity from the Pilgrims to the present. Cullen begins by noting that the United States, unlike most...

"...Leading scholars offer compelling glimpses into the biblical world, the world in which prophets, poets, sages, and historians created one of our most important texts -- the bible...The authors also examine such issues as the roles of women, the tensions between urban and rural settings, royal and kinship social structures, and official and popular religions of the region."-- from book jacket.

"The Cambridge Dictionary of Classical Civilization provides an authoritative survey of the classical world, combining the traditional strengths of classical subjects with new approaches examining the social and cultural features of the ancient Greek and Roman world. Ranging in time from post-Bronze Age Greece to the later Roman Empire, it looks not only at ancient Greece and Rome, but discusses those cultures with which Greeks and Romans exchanged...

The Baker Encyclopedia of Bible Places is a major reference and resource book for the topography and archaeology of Bible times. Listing alphabetically all the main towns and cities, villages and settlements, streams and rivers, countries and states mentioned in the Bible, it is fully illustrated in color throughout. The fruit of the specialist knowledge of more than seventy scholars, the text reflects the latest in archaeological and biblical studies....

"More than 4,000 years ago, the ancient Greeks invaded the rugged hills and fertile plains of the Balkan Peninsula, and in the centuries that followed, they built one of the greatest and most influential civilizations in history. Their enduring legacy to modern society includes mythology, poetry, drama, sculpture, architecture, science, and political thought. Spanning more than 2,000 years, from the beginning of Minoan civilization in the third millennium...

A superb interdisciplinary reference guide to the whole Romantic period, with numerous illustrations, presenting great literary figures such as Wordsworth and Coleridge along-side their counterparts in the field of art, music, design, science, politics, and the history of ideas, within a broad cultural and historical perspective. Forty essays on key topics, written by major international authorities, are complemented by an alphabetical reference section...

In the summer of 1993 Foreign Affairs published an article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" by Samuel Huntington. No article, according to the editors of that distinguished journal, has generated more discussion since George Kennan's "X" article on containment in the 1940s. Now, Mr. Huntington expands on his article, explores further the issues he raised then, and develops many new penetrating and controversial analyses. In the article, he posed...

In Great Books, Denby lives the common adult fantasy of returning to school with some worldly knowledge and experience of life. A gifted story-teller, he leads us on a glorious tour - by turns eloquent, witty, and moving - through the works themselves and through his experiences as a middle-aged man among freshmen. He recounts his failures and triumphs as a reader and student (taking an exam led to a hilarious near-breakdown). He celebrates his rediscovery...