Download or read book War in Human Civilization written by Azar Gat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? And what of war today: is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? This book sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the riddle of war throughout human history.
Download or read book Making the Social World written by John Searle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.
Download or read book The Substance of Civilization written by Stephen L. Sass and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the way in which the discovery, application, and adaptation of materials has shaped the course of human history and the routines of our daily existence.
Download or read book Origins written by Lewis Dartnell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times-bestselling author explains how the physical world shaped the history of our species When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the south-east United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea. Everywhere is the deep imprint of the planetary on the human. From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, Origins reveals the breathtaking impact of the earth beneath our feet on the shape of our human civilizations.
Download or read book Marks of Civilization written by Arnold Rubin and published by University of California Los Angeles, Fowler Museum of Cultural History. This book was released on 1988 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body piercing, scarification, tattooing - for thousands of years decorative alteration of the human body has been invested with profound cultural and social meaning. This collection of essays, photographs and drawings focuses on the many and diverse ways that human beings have permanently decorated their bodies.
Download or read book The Rise of Civilization written by John Farndon and published by Hungry Tomato ®. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take an enthralling journey from the Stone Age onward, and see how our ancestors became great builders and rulers. They grew food, discovered metals, made tools, and invented writing. You will see a mighty civilization in Egypt, wise Chinese philosophy, Maya culture in Central America, the colossal Roman Empire, and much more. Illustrated maps let you compare what is happening across the globe at various moments in time. While the Santorini volcano was wiping out the Minoan civilization, flushing toilets were being invented in the Indus Valley (Pakistan). The Greeks held the earliest Olympic Games while the Zapotec built pyramids in Mexico. Find out where it all started!
Download or read book The Human Cosmos written by Jo Marchant and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Best Book of 2020 (NPR) A Best Book of 2020 (The Economist) A Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 (Smithsonian) A Best Science and Technology Book of 2020 (Library Journal) A Must-Read Book to Escape the Chaos of 2020 (Newsweek) Starred review (Booklist) Starred review (Publishers Weekly) A historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It's a disconnect with a dire cost. Our relationship to the stars and planets has moved from one of awe, wonder and superstition to one where technology is king—the cosmos is now explored through data on our screens, not by the naked eye observing the natural world. Indeed, in most countries, modern light pollution obscures much of the night sky from view. Jo Marchant's spellbinding parade of the ways different cultures celebrated the majesty and mysteries of the night sky is a journey to the most awe-inspiring view you can ever see: looking up on a clear dark night. That experience and the thoughts it has engendered have radically shaped human civilization across millennia. The cosmos is the source of our greatest creativity in art, in science, in life. To show us how, Jo Marchant takes us to the Hall of the Bulls in the caves at Lascaux in France, and to the summer solstice at a 5,000-year-old tomb at Newgrange, Ireland. We discover Chumash cosmology and visit medieval monks grappling with the nature of time and Tahitian sailors navigating by the stars. We discover how light reveals the chemical composition of the sun, and we are with Einstein as he works out that space and time are one and the same. A four-billion-year-old meteor inspires a search for extraterrestrial life. The cosmically liberating, summary revelation is that star-gazing made us human.
Download or read book The Dawn of Everything written by David Graeber and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Download or read book Energy and Civilization written by Vaclav Smil and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society throughout history, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel–driven civilization. "I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next 'Star Wars' movie. In his latest book, Energy and Civilization: A History, he goes deep and broad to explain how innovations in humans' ability to turn energy into heat, light, and motion have been a driving force behind our cultural and economic progress over the past 10,000 years. —Bill Gates, Gates Notes, Best Books of the Year Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows—ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity—for their civilized existence. In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel–driven civilization. Humans are the only species that can systematically harness energies outside their bodies, using the power of their intellect and an enormous variety of artifacts—from the simplest tools to internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors. The epochal transition to fossil fuels affected everything: agriculture, industry, transportation, weapons, communication, economics, urbanization, quality of life, politics, and the environment. Smil describes humanity's energy eras in panoramic and interdisciplinary fashion, offering readers a magisterial overview. This book is an extensively updated and expanded version of Smil's Energy in World History (1994). Smil has incorporated an enormous amount of new material, reflecting the dramatic developments in energy studies over the last two decades and his own research over that time.
Download or read book Follow the Flock written by Sally Coulthard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An addictively free-ranging survey of the massive impact that the humble and loveable sheep have had on human history. From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the rolling hills of medieval England to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, the domesticated ungulates of the genus Ovis—sheel—have been central to the human story. Starting with our Neolithic ancestors' first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 10,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and languages, helped us to win wars, decorated our homes, and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth. Enormous fortunes and new, society-changing industries have been made from the fleeces of sheep, and cities shaped by shepherds' markets and meat trading. Sally Coulthard weaves the rich and fascinating story of sheep into a vivid and colorful tapestry, thickly threaded with engaging anecdotes and remarkable ovine facts, whose multiple strands reflect the deep penetration of these woolly animals into every aspect of human society and culture.
Download or read book Rethinking Civilization written by Majid Tehranian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume offers an alternative view of human civilization in a globalizing age, exploring the uneven pace of development of human societies, particularly in the last two centuries, and arguing that this is leading to a global civil war.
Download or read book Health and the Rise of Civilization written by Mark Nathan Cohen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civilized nations popularly assume that "primitive" societies are poor, ill, and malnourished and that progress through civilization automatically implies improved health. In this provocative new book, Mark Nathan Cohen challenges this belief. Using evidence from epidemiology, anthropology, and archaeology, Cohen provides fascinating evidence about the actual effects of civilization on health, suggesting that some aspects of civilization create as many health problems as they prevent or cure. " This book] is certain to become a classic-a prominent and respected source on this subject for years into the future. . . . If you want to read something that will make you think, reflect and reconsider, Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization is for you."-S. Boyd Eaton, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A major accomplishment. Cohen is a broad and original thinker who states his views in direct and accessible prose. . . . This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in disease, civilization, and the human condition."-David Courtwright, Journal of the History of Medicine "Deserves to be read by anthropologists concerned with health, medical personnel responsible for communities, and any medical anthropologists whose minds are not too case-hardened. Indeed, it could provide great profit and entertainment to the general reader."-George T. Nurse, Current Anthropology "Cohen has done his homework extraordinarily well, and the coverage of the biomedical, nutritional, demographic, and ethnographic literature about foragers and low energy agriculturists is excellent. The subject of culture and health is near the core of a lot of areas of archaeology and ethnology as well as demography, development economics, and so on. The book deserves a wide readership and a central place in our professional libraries. As a scholarly summary it is without parallel."-Henry Harpending, American Ethnologist
Download or read book The Course of Human History written by Johan Goudsblom and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores four major features of human society in their ecological and historical context: the origins of priests and organised religion; the rise of military men in an agrarian society; economic expansion and growth; and civilising and decivilising trends over time.
Download or read book The Human Civilization written by Valentin Matcas and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Were there advanced civilizations on Earth older than what it is currently believed and accepted? Because we keep noticing their traces all around, while authorities deny their presence. Are there other civilizations out there among planets and stars? Because we keep seeing their members around us, pursuing their obscure interests while flying in their 'unidentified' vehicles, with authorities ignoring everything. Are there nonhuman civilizations on Earth parallel to the Human Civilization? Because they interact from the shadow of the underground with the Human Civilization, while again, authorities deny systematically their presence. And when authorities are constrained in any way to give an answer, they respond vaguely: 'it is a matter of human survival.' What exactly is a matter of human survival? And even so, how could humans defend themselves of anyone or anything if they are held in ignorance and denial? Why is Humanity kept ignorant in what it concerns the most important subject of all, life all around and life eternally, intelligent and civilized? Because if there are other civilizations on Earth and elsewhere, human or not, if there are other realities up there besides this one, populated and civilized, then people's ignorance renders them vulnerable when they die and have to go elsewhere. In this manner, once you ignore the kind of realities that may be out there, you might be tricked to go and live in treacherous, dubious, unholy worlds claiming that they are in fact the holly lands promised to you by your own religion. And so you disappear. Because it is stated in religious records to be careful not to follow false deities. Yet how can you know anything in this domain, if you are kept ignorant the whole time, and probably lied to, misled, and many times tempted with irrelevant material compensations throughout life? This is the case mostly if you are from the Brotherhood and the Elite, or if you support these in any way from the Masses, which everybody does. Throughout this book, we form a comprehensive model of a civilization from all perspectives, model that may be used to study and understand all civilizations. We also use this model to study the Human Civilization, along with all civilizations influencing the Human Civilization directly and implicitly. This research is part of a comprehensive study of life, intelligence, societies, cognition, reality, interconnectivity, and this world, a study of living beings all around including humans, of their life and reasoning, of their place and meaning in life and in the world, part of this entire book series called "The One." As you notice, this book is not about persuading you to believe or not that there are other civilizations out there and up there, but this book helps you understand civilizations from a rigorous, comprehensive perspective, including the meaning, interests, agreements, and intentions that civilizations have in the wider world, why individuals form civilizations as an end product of their cumulative lifetime efforts, and furthermore, what meanings these civilizations have in the wider world, how and in what manner these civilizations interact within themselves and with the wider world, and how exactly their meaning in the wider world relates to the meaning of each one of their members. This study seeks to understand your own place in this extraordinary human endeavor that is the Human Civilization, and through it, it depicts your own place and meaning in the higher and wider world and existence.
Download or read book The Musical Human written by Michael Spitzer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Full of delightful nuggets' Guardian online 'Entertaining, informative and philosphical ... An essential read' All About History 'Extraordinary range ... All the world and more is here' Evening Standard 165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago came the first melody. 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet it is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages – from Bach to BTS and back – to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, from global history to our everyday lives, from insects to apes, humans to artificial intelligence. 'Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible: a Guns, Germs and Steel for music' Daniel Levitin 'A thrilling exploration of what music has meant and means to humankind' Ian Bostridge
Download or read book A Brief Natural History of Civilization written by Mark Bertness and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling evolutionary narrative that reveals how human civilization follows the same ecological rules that shape all life on Earth Offering a bold new understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going, noted ecologist Mark Bertness argues that human beings and their civilization are the products of the same self-organization, evolutionary adaptation, and natural selection processes that have created all other life on Earth. Bertness follows the evolutionary process from the primordial soup of two billion years ago through today, exploring the ways opposing forces of competition and cooperation have led to current assemblages of people, animals, and plants. Bertness’s thoughtful examination of human history from the perspective of natural history provides new insights about why and how civilization developed as it has and explores how humans, as a species, might have to consciously overrule our evolutionary drivers to survive future challenges.
Download or read book Climate Change in Human History written by Benjamin Lieberman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate Change and Human History provides a concise introduction to the relationship between human beings and climate change throughout history. Starting hundreds of thousands of years ago and going up to the present day, this book illustrates how natural climate variability affected early human societies and how human activity is now leading to drastic changes to our climate. Taking a chronological approach the authors explain how climate change created opportunities and challenges for human societies in each major time period, covering themes such as phases of climate and history, climate shocks, the rise and fall of civilizations, industrialization, accelerating climate change and our future outlook. This 2nd edition includes a new chapter on the explosion of social movements, protest groups and key individuals since 2017 and the implications this has had on the history of climate change, an improved introduction to the Anthropocene and extra content on the basic dynamics of the climate system alongside updated historiography. With more case studies, images and individuals throughout the text, the second edition also includes a glossary of terms and further reading to aid students in understanding this interdisciplinary subject. An ideal companion for all students of environmental history, Climate Change and Human History clearly demonstrates the critical role of climate in shaping human history and of the experience of humans in both adapting to and shaping climate change.
