History
Armesto - The World - A History
Author: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2006, 1152pp, 1st ed.
This is the world history textbook that gives students the whole story. The World is the first world history introductory textbook that shows, through a holistic, truly engaging narrative, the fundamental interrelationships between peoples and their environment. The textboook is a new kind of history textbook — not just a collection of facts and figures.
History
Maps of Time - An Introduction to Big History
Author: David Christian
Publisher: University of California, 2005, 664pp, 1st ed.
An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, Maps of Time is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian's text views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human beings. Cosmology, geology, archeology, and population and environmental studies - all figure in David Christian's account, which is an ambitious overview of the emerging field of "Big History."
History
Video Lectures - Big History - The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity
Author: David Christian
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2005, 48pp, 1st ed.
A Grand Synthesis of Knowledge - Have you ever wondered: How do various scholarly discourses—cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, history — fit together? Taught by historian David Christian, Big History offers a unique opportunity to view human history in the context of the many histories that surround it. Over the course of 48 thought-provoking lectures, he'll serve as your guide as you traverse the sweeping expanse of cosmic history—13.7 billion years of it—starting with the big bang and traveling through time and space to the present moment.
History
Video Lectures - Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations
Author: Brian M. Fagan
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2005, 36pp, 1st ed.
Where do we come from? How did our ancestors settle this planet? How did the great historic civilizations of the world develop? How does a past so shadowy that it has to be painstakingly reconstructed from fragmentary, largely unwritten records nonetheless make us who and what we are?
This course brings you the answers that the latest scientific and archaeological research and theorizing suggest about human origins, how populations developed, and the ways in which civilizations spread throughout the globe.
History
Video Lectures - Foundations of Western Civilization
Author: Thomas F. X. Noble
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2005, 48pp, 1st ed.
You can discover the essential nature, evolution, and perceptions of Western civilization from its humble beginnings in the great river valleys of Iraq and Egypt to the dawn of the modern world. With these 48 lectures on the people, places, ideas, and events that make up The Foundations of Western Civilization, award-winning scholar and teacher Thomas F. X. Noble of the University of Notre Dame invites you to explore the vast and rich territory of Western civilization.
History
Video Lectures - Foundations of Western Civilization II: A History of the Modern Western World
Author: Robert Bucholz
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2005, 48pp, 1st ed.
This extraordinary and comprehensive view of history explores the ideas, events, and characters that modeled Western political, social, religious, intellectual, cultural, scientific, technological, and economic history during the tumultuous period between the 16th and 20th centuries. Your journey begins with a close look at the backgrounds to the modern Western world and an exploration of how Western Europe transitioned from a medieval mindset to the modern path that would take it through the next 600 years.
History
Video Lectures - Interpreting the 20th Century: The Struggle Over Democracy
Author: Pamela Radcliff
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2005, 48pp, 1st ed.
The 20th century transformed the political, social, and economic structures of the world in ways no one could have imagined as the 1800s came to a close. Interpreting the 20th Century: The Struggle Over Democracy is a comprehensive 48-lecture examination of this extraordinary time. It is a course designed around history's ideas as much as its events, revealing how those ideas both influenced events and were in turn influenced by them to shape today's world. It is a unique opportunity to gain a multidisciplinary understanding of how the modern world came to be and how democracy has emerged as a political ideal, although the parameters of a truly democratic world order are still being vigorously contested.
History
Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin, 2005, 592pp, 1st ed.
Diamond casts a wide net in the realms of history, geography, and science to address questions essential to humanity's continued survival.
History
Guns, Germs and Steel
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: W. W. Norton, 2005, 512pp, 1st ed.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples.