Civilization

A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution - from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality - revealing new possibilities for human emancipation....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right....

Yuval Noah Harari returns with an original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms....

The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation....

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....  

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece....

If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives....

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. The pessimists insist that we will reach a turning point and things will get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years....

A fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home....

The author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization....

Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the 21st century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date....

Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices....

Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Find out....

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen....

Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic, geographic, or anthropogenic as it is narrative....

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages....

The New York Times best-selling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live — how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die....

A historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it....

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities....

Civilization was born 8,000 years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place....

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest....

Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years.

The early first millennium BCE was a time of great change and turmoil in the Near East and Eastern Europe. Many of the Bronze Age empires had collapsed, but in their place came new ones in Assyria, Persia, and Babylon, as well as a rejuvenated Egypt. Other peoples also began to enter the historical record and assert themselves. In the wake of the Sea Peoples destruction in Anatolia, the Lydians and Phrygians established powerful kingdoms, and by the 8th century BCE the Greek city-states had formed and the Greeks began establishing colonies along the western coast of Anatolia.

Do you want to learn about Sumerians? The changes that took рlасе on the Mesopotamian рlаin bеtwееn the Tigris аnd Euрhrаtеѕ rivers in thе fourth аnd third millеnniа BC are of сruсiаl importance in understanding ѕubѕеԛuеnt developments in Wеѕtеrn Aѕiа аnd bеуоnd. Sinсе 1991, it hаѕ nоt bееn possible tо dig in Irаԛ itѕеlf, аnd аѕ a dirесt result оf this, thеrе hаѕ bееn аn еxрlоѕiоn of аrсhаеоlоgiсаl асtivitу in nеighbоring countries, ѕuсh аѕ Sуriа and thе Gulf Stаtеѕ.

 The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning. Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of history, a multi-layered masterpiece that blends economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale. 

Over 1,100 years before William the Conqueror became the King of England after the Battle of Hastings, Julius Caesar came, saw, and conquered part of “Britannia”, setting up a Roman province with a puppet king in 54 BCE. In the new province, the Romans eventually constructed a military outpost overlooking a bridge across the River Thames. The new outpost was named Londinium, and it covered just over two dozen acres. By the second century CE, Londinium was a large Roman city, with tens of thousands of inhabitants using villas, palaces, a forum, temples, and baths.

Rome's complex relationship with animals goes right back to its foundation myth, and even today, the wolf remains a symbol of the Eternal City, forming part of the logo for the capital's football team, A.S. Roma. According to tradition, the city of Rome was founded by Romulus, who, with his brother Remus, was nursed and sheltered by a she-wolf. A detailed analysis of Roman attitudes toward animals reveals a great deal of information about Roman society in general, particularly its sense of morality and ethics.

Blending high adventure with history, this chronicle of 100 astonishing discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the fabulous “Lost City of the Monkey God” tells incredible stories of how explorers and archaeologists have uncovered the clues that illuminate our past. 

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.

Discover the rich and complex history of the peoples of Africa, and the struggles and triumphs of Black cultures and communities around the world. With profiles of key people, movements, and events, The Black History Book brings together accounts of the most significant ideas and milestones in Black history and culture. This vital and thought-provoking audiobook presents a bold and accessible overview of the history of the African continent and its peoples - from the earliest human migrations to modern Black communities and the African diaspora.

Atlantis: The Antediluvian World is a pseudo-archaeological work published in 1882 by the Minnesotan author Ignatius L. Donnelly. He argues that all known ancient civilizations were descended from this lost land which once existed in the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the Mediterranean Sea. The author claims that the description of this island given by Plato is not fable, but veritable history. Many of its theories are the source of contemporary concepts about Atlantis, including that the civilization and technology were beyond its time.

Pandemic, climate change, or war: Our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival. In The Next Apocalypse, archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakdowns are actually less about cataclysmic destruction than they are about long processes of change. 

 In A Human History of Emotion, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes listeners on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history — from Ancient Greece to Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and beyond.