Modern Global History

In this erudite and enjoyable Los Angeles Times best seller, Joel Kotkin explores the history of cities around the globe. He argues that urban areas must be places where there is a shared feeling of sacredness, civic identity, and moral order. These exciting concentrations of ideas and energy have long been and should continue to be meaningful in our daily lives.

Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer - democratic practices were present in many places at many other times. David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished - and when and why they declined - can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493—an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the...

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade. ...

Aunque la masonería esté envuelta en un halo de misterio, su historia la pueblan algunas de las personas más importantes de los últimos siglos, como Churchill, Disney, Mozart, Franklin o Kipling. Fundada en Londres en 1717 con una clara vocación de hermanamiento entre hombres, la Orden se expandió con rapidez. Durante el mandato de George Washington, se convirtió en el credo de la nueva nación americana. Tanto la Iglesia mormona como la mafia siciliana le deben sus orígenes.

An award-winning journalist reveals the dramatic true story of the CIA's Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11. America is reeling; Al-Qaeda has struck and thousands are dead. The country scrambles to respond, but the Pentagon has no plan for...

The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. “Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" —Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction "The...

It is difficult to conceive of the vast scale of the history of life on Earth, from the very first living organisms sparking into life in hydrothermal deep-sea vents to the dizzying diversity of life today. The evolution of life is a sweeping epic of a tale, with twists and turns, surprising heroes and unlikely survivors. The Earth beautifully distils this complex story into a meaningful scale. In taking a closer look at 47 carefully selected organisms over 15 periods in our planetary history, this audiobook tells the whole story of life on Earth.

Discover the Epic Story of Cinema—From Flickering Frames to Streaming Screens. In The Global History of Film, acclaimed author Oliver Greyson delivers an engaging and comprehensive narrative of the world’s most captivating art form. Spanning over a century, this book traces the evolution of cinema from its earliest experiments in light and motion to the groundbreaking films of today.

A case for why regionalization, not globalization, has been the biggest economic trend of the past forty years.

Riveting stories of our last frontier and the acts of God and man upon it Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at...

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the "rise of the West" is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles.