All tagged History
Civilization has spanned millennia, yet modern science—distinct from the ancient and medieval sciences or what was once called natural philosophy—has existed for only a few centuries. Why did it take so long? Why weren’t the ancient Babylonians launching zero-gravity observatories into orbit? Why weren’t the ancient Greeks developing flu vaccines and performing heart transplants? The ancients were certainly not devoid of a thirst to unravel the mysteries of the world.
In The Medici, Paul Strathern presents a masterful narrative of one of the most influential families in the history of Florence, Italy. Strathern adeptly interweaves the Medici family's story with the broader historical and cultural context of Renaissance Italy, providing readers with a profound understanding of the era in which they flourished.
The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. The author brought forth the central thesis that it is not racial biology that determines the victors in history but rather a complex combination of agriculture, geography, population density, and continental orientation. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. Throughout the book, Diamond showed us how history is not just “one damn fact after another” as cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
This is an analysis not of Britain, or the British Isles—but purely of the English. Tombs reviewed conventional beliefs about the past such as the Anglo-Saxon liberties, the common law, the influence of Magna Carta, and the cause and effect of the Industrial Revolution. Tombs also examined the ambiguities and aftermath of the Victorian age at the reasons for participating in the First World War, and the divided memories of that calamity.
This book is an exhaustive account of human exploitation on a gargantuan scale. It is about the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton, but more so about the history of human tragedy of war capitalism, imperial devastation, brutal slavery and echelon systems based on involuntary servitudes.
The present washed away the past. We forgot the yesterday where the Silk Roads is the bridges between the East and West where great centres of civilisation rose. Ancient civilisation such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Akkad in Mesopotamia were famed for their grandeur and architectural innovation. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is where the world’s great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged along side those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away.
Interesting phenomenon: If you look at the democratic nations today, most of them had raised revolutions, fighting for democracy at some point in history. However, Japan hasn’t. Ironically, Japan’s “democracy” was “imposed” on them during the occupation of the US after WWII…….
An embellished Torah bag hemmed with the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, next to a photo of leder-hosened Jewish mountain climbers, reminds us that Germany was not always anti-Semitic……
Can you believe that Homo Sapiens, once a species with no significance, skyrocketed to the top of the food chain because of our abilities to imagine fiction, bullshit and gossip?
