von Leonard Shlain

This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind.

von Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore was a fierce opponent of British rule in India. In this work he discusses the resurgence of the East and the challenge it poses to Western supremacy, calling for a future beyond nationalism, based instead on cooperation and racial tolerance. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

von Toby Green

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial AwardWinner of the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown 2020Winner of the American Historical Association's Jerry Bentley Prize in World History 2020Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019An Observer and Wall Street Journal Book of the Year 2019A groundbreaking history that will transform our view of West AfricaBy the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil.Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art.Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa.A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph

von Yuval Noah Harari

NATIONAL BESTSELLERThis second volume of Sapiens: A Graphic History, the full-color graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari’s #1 New York Times bestseller, focuses on the Agricultural Revolution—when humans fell into a trap we’ve yet to escape: working harder and harder with diminishing returns.What if humanity’s major woes—war, plague, famine and inequality—originated 12,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens converted from nomads to settlers, in pursuit of the fantasy of productivity and efficiency? What if by seeking to control plants and animals, humans ended up being controlled by kings, priests, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy? Volume 2 of Sapiens: A Graphic History–The Pillars of Civilization explores a crucial chapter in human development: the Agricultural Revolution. This is the story of how wheat took over the world; how an unlikely marriage between a god and a bureaucrat created the first empires; and how war, plague, famine, and inequality became an intractable feature of the human condition.But it’s not all doom and gloom with this book’s cast of entertaining characters and colorful humorous scenes. Yuval, Zoe, Prof. Saraswati, Cindy and Bill (now farmers), Detective Lopez, and Dr. Fiction, all introduced in Volume 1, once again travel the length and breadth of human history, this time investigating the impact the Agricultural Revolution has had on our species. The cunning Mephisto shows them how to ensnare humans, King Hammurabi lays down the law, and Confucius explains harmonious society. The origins of modern farming are introduced through Elizabethan tragedy; the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News; the story of urbanization is portrayed as a travel brochure, offering discount journeys to ancient Babylon and China; and the history of inequality unfolds in a superhero detective story; with guest appearances by historical and cultural personalities throughout such as Thomas Jefferson, Scarlett O'Hara, Margaret Thatcher, and John Lennon.Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 is a radical, witty and colorful retelling of the story of humankind for adults and young adults, and can be read on its own or in sequence with Volume I.

von Michael King

New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce a full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed the franchise, the movements and the conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth. This title tells that story in all its colour and drama. The narrative that emerges is an inclusive one about men and women, Maori and Pakeha. It shows that British motives in colonizing New Zealand were essentially humane; and that Maori, far from being passive victims of a "fatal impact", coped heroically with colonization and survived by selectively accepting and adapting what Western technology and culture had to offer. The latter part of the book reveals how an insulated and dependent British colony transformed itself into an independent nation, open to and competing with technological and cultural influences sweeping the globe.

von Edward W. Said

Following his profoundly influential study, Orientalism, Edward Said now examines western culture. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism is a broad, fierce and wonderfully readable account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

von Richard Salomon

This book provides a general survey of all the inscriptional material in the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and modern Indo-Aryan languages, including donative, dedicatory, panegyric, ritual, and literary texts carved on stone, metal, and other materials. This material comprises many thousands of documents dating from a range of more than two millennia, found in India and the neighboring nations of South Asia, as well as in many parts of Southeast, central, and East Asia. The inscriptions are written, for the most part, in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts and their many varieties and derivatives.Inscriptional materials are of particular importance for the study of the Indian world, constituting the most detailed and accurate historical and chronological data for nearly all aspects of traditional Indian culture in ancient and medieval times. Richard Salomon surveys the entire corpus of Indo-Aryan inscriptions in terms of their contents, languages, scripts, and historical and cultural significance. He presents this material in such a way as to make it useful not only to Indologists but also non-specialists, including persons working in other aspects of Indian or South Asian studies, as well as scholars of epigraphy and ancient history and culture in other regions of the world.

von Nicolás Wey Gómez

A radical revision of the geographical history of the discovery of the Americas that links Columbus's southbound route with colonialism, slavery, and today's divide between the industrialized North and the developing South.Everyone knows that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, seeking a new route to the East. Few note, however, that Columbus's intention was also to sail south, to the tropics. In The Tropics of Empire, Nicolás Wey Gómez rewrites the geographical history of the discovery of the Americas, casting it as part of Europe's reawakening to the natural and human resources of the South. Wey Gómez shows that Columbus shared in a scientific and technical tradition that linked terrestrial latitude to the nature of places, and that he drew a highly consequential distinction between the higher, cooler latitudes of Mediterranean Europe and the globe's lower, hotter latitudes. The legacy of Columbus's assumptions, Wey Gómez contends, ranges from colonialism and slavery in the early Caribbean to the present divide between the industrialized North and the developing South. This distinction between North and South allowed Columbus to believe not only that he was heading toward the largest and richest lands on the globe but also that the people he would encounter there were bound to possess a nature (whether “childish” or “monstrous”) that seemed to justify rendering them Europe's subjects or slaves. The political lessons Columbus drew from this distinction provided legitimacy to a process of territorial expansion that was increasingly being construed as the discovery of the vast and unexpectedly productive “torrid zone.” The Tropics of Empire investigates the complicated nexus between place and colonialism in Columbus's invention of the American tropics. It tells the story of a culture intent on remaining the moral center of an expanding geography that was slowly relegating Europe to the northern fringe of the globe. Wey Gómez draws on sources that include official debates over Columbus's proposal to the Spanish crown, Columbus's own writings and annotations, and accounts by early biographers. The Tropics of Empire is illustrated by color reproductions of period maps that make vivid the geographical conceptions of Columbus and his contemporaries.

von Brian Harrison, Brian Howard Harrison

In 1970 the 'cold war' was still cold, Northern Ireland's troubles were escalating, the UK's relations with the EEC were unclear, and corporatist approaches to the economy precariously persisted. By 1990 Communism was crumbling world-wide, Thatcher's economic revolution had occurred, terrorism in Northern Ireland was waning, 'multi-culturalism' was in place, family structures were changing fast, and British political institutions had become controversial. Seven analytic chapters pursue these changes and accumulate rich detail on changes in international relations, landscape and townscape, social framework, family and welfare structures, economic policies and realities, intellect and culture, politics and government. The concluding chapter ranges chronologically even more widely to bring out the interaction of past and present, then asks how far the UK had by 1990 identified its world role. Like Harrison's Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951-1970 (2009) - the immediately preceding volume in this series - Finding a Role? includes a full chronological table and an ample index of names and themes. This, the first thorough, wide-ranging, and synoptic study of the UK so far published on this period, has two overriding aims: to show how British institutions evolved, but also to illuminate changes in the British people: their hopes and fears, values and enjoyments, failures and achievements. It therefore equips its readers to understand events since 1990, and so to decide for themselves where the UK should now be going.

von Aaron Rosen, Susie Brooks, Susie Hodge, Mary Richards

Imagine having 5,000 years of human history's most amazing artworks at your fingertips! Go on a trip through the famous Metropolitan Museum of Art without ever leaving your home! Prepare to explore the treasures of the world's civilisations-from ancient Egyptian amulets, Mayan jewellery, and prehistoric tools-to Medieval tapestries, Renaissance suits of armour, and modern-day baseball cards. Each page brings you closer to the past as you learn about the people of different ages through the objects they left behind. Discover hand-picked highlights of the museum's huge collection as you travel through history, one incredible object at a time. This book combines exclusive Met photography with colourful and quirky illustrations in a resource that parents can trust, with a design that kids will love. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York