Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics, contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. This book is not just about Scotland: it is an exciting...

"A book that makes the case for evolution over design and skewers a widespread but dangerous myth: that we have ultimate control over our world"-- Publisher.

A bestselling historian shows how the British Empire created the modern world, in a book lauded as "a rattling good tale" (Wall Street Journal) and "popular history at its best" (Washington Post) The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's Age of Empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English...

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens. Meanwhile, Mother Nature is also seeing dramatic changes as carbon levels rise and species go extinct, with compounding results. How do these changes interact, and how can we cope with them? With...

The modern world was created through the combination and complex interactions of five grand transitions. First, the demographic transition changed the total numbers, dynamics, structure, and residential pattern of populations. The agricultural and dietary transition led to the emergence of highly productive cropping and animal husbandry (subsidized by fossil energies and electricity), which eliminated famines, reduced malnutrition, and improved the...

The New York Times best selling co-author of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which 'progress' has perverted the way we live: how people eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die.

Describes the impact that the translation of "On the Nature of Things" by Roman philosopher Lucretius had on history, inspiring artists, great thinkers, and scientists of the fifteenth century and fueling the beginning of the Renaissance.

"Civilization is in crisis, facing disasters of our own making on the only planet known to bear life in the vast void of the universe. We have become unwitting gardeners of the Earth, not in control, but setting the conditions under which all of life flourishesor not. Truly, its survival of the innovators. The Unnatural World chronicles a disparate band of unlikely heroes: an effervescent mad scientist who would fertilize the seas;...