Global History

As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest. Within fifty years the United States had shipped taco shells everywhere from Alaska to Australia, Morocco to Mongolia. But how did this tasty hand-held food - and Mexican food more broadly - become so ubiquitous? In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world.

Henry Every was the 17th century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular - and wildly inaccurate - reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event - the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew - and its surprising repercussions across time and space.

We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity's busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state.

This book is a collection of essays grouped into chapters, each offering insights into the step-by-step evolution of Halloween, starting right from its earliest historical origins. The book takes us on a journey through time, uncovering the various stages that led to the creation of the Halloween we know today.

The Christian church of the early centuries spread throughout much of Asia, Africa, and Europe, spoke many languages, was situated within diverse cultural settings, and had varied worship practices; yet it maintained a vital unity on core teachings. In The Global Church - The First Eight Centuries: From Pentecost through the Rise of Islam, author Donald Fairbairn helps listeners understand both the diversity and unity of the church in this pivotal era.

In this new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides a deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow.

In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: it is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia.

On May 6, 2010, financial markets around the world tumbled simultaneously and without warning. In the span of five minutes, a trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became known, represented the fastest drop in market history. When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around the globe were left perplexed. A real-life financial thriller, Flash Crash uncovers the remarkable, behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying market crash, a globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and the man at the center of them both.

Voici une histoire de France, de toute la France, en très longue durée qui mène de la grotte Chauvet aux événements de 2015, sans s'embarrasser de la question des origines. Une histoire qui prend au large le destin d'un pays qui n'existe pas séparément du monde, même si parfois il prétend l'incarner tout entier. Une histoire qui n'abandonne pas pour autant la chronologie ni le plaisir du récit, puisque c'est par dates qu'elle s'organise et que chaque date est traitée comme une petite intrigue.

In this era of government gridlock, economic and ecological devastation, and seemingly intractable global violence, our future is ever more ripe for - and in need of - fresh, creative reimagining. With her clear-eyed, inspiring, and sweeping vision of a possible global renaissance in the new millennium, Barbara Marx Hubbard shows us that our current crises are not the precursors of an apocalypse, but the natural birth pains of an awakened, universal humanity.

In the 6th century AD, the Near East was divided between two venerable empires: the Persian and the Roman. A hundred years on and one had vanished forever, while the other seemed almost finished. Ruling in their place were the Arabs: an upheaval so profound that it spelt, in effect, the end of the ancient world. In The Shadow of the Sword, Tom Holland explores how this came about.

Desvela los mecanismos ocultos de la dominación mundial con Globalismo: Ingeniería social y control total en el siglo XXI. El exitoso autor Agustín Laje desentraña magistralmente la malvada realidad de nuestro mundo moderno e ilumina las tinieblas de las fuerzas de poder que tratan de controlar a la humanidad.

In Five Cities that Ruled the World, theologian Douglas Wilson fuses together, in compelling detail, the critical moments birthed in history’s most influential cities—Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and New York.

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue”—an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

The Wireless World sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the coauthors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion.

As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten. But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire.

A National Book Award winner, Martin E. Marty is a University of Chicago Professor Emeritus, Lutheran minister, and prolific writer on history, culture, and theology. In his comprehensive yet concise The Christian World, Marty outlines the life and teachings of Christ and details how his followers spread the gospel to the world.

In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and materiel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.

Almost 10 years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his best seller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars.

Learn about how foreign soldiers were prized by the Union and Confederate armies because they had experience fighting in European wars.