What was life like on our planet long before the early humans emerged?
Paleontologist Dr. Mark P. Witton draws on the latest twenty-first century discoveries to re-create the appearances and lifestyles of extinct, fascinating species, the environments they inhabited, and the challenges they faced living on an ever-changing planet. A worthy successor to Charles Knight's beloved 1946 classic, Life through the Ages II takes us on an unforgettable journey through the evolution of life on Earth.
Dozens of gorgeous color illustrations and meticulously researched, accompanying commentary showcase the succession of lost worlds, defining events, and ancient creatures that have appeared since the earth was formed, creating an indispensable guide to explore what came before us.
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling--mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues--have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.
An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent--and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
Автор: Weinrich, A K H Название: African Farmers in Rhodesia ISBN: 1138599743 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781138599741 Издательство: Taylor&Francis Рейтинг: Цена: 5358.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: Originally published in 1975 this book analyses the factors making for success and failure in agricultural development among black Zimbabweans during the 20th century.
Описание: "Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris, author of the best-selling Why the West Rules--for Now, explains why. The result is a compelling new argument about the evolution of human values, one that has far-reaching implications for how we understand the past--and for what might happen next. Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need--from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. In tiny forager bands, people who value equality but are ready to settle problems violently do better than those who aren`t; in large farming societies, people who value hierarchy and are less willing to use violence do best; and in huge fossil-fuel societies, the pendulum has swung back toward equality but even further away from violence. But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out--at some point fairly soon--not to be useful any more. Originating as the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, the book includes challenging responses by novelist Margaret Atwood, philosopher Christine Korsgaard, classicist Richard Seaford, and historian of China Jonathan Spence"--
Автор: Hoch Steven L. Название: Essays in Russian Social and Economic History ISBN: 161811428X ISBN-13(EAN): 9781618114280 Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan) Рейтинг: Цена: 14414.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: In this wide-ranging collection from Professor Steven L. Hoch of Washington State University, various facets of the life of Russia’s rural population are examined, from banking crises and infectious diseases to peasant rituals and land reform. In contrast to longstanding interpretations of the Russian peasantry, Hoch’s work emphasizes the role of social, epidemiological, and ecological forces in the formation of rural Russian society. Using sources infrequently considered by previous scholars, he assesses the impact of the broad economy on shaping the government polices of emancipation and land reform and the long-term consequences of these policies on peasant material well-being.
This book reconsiders how we can understand archaeology on a grand scale by abandoning the claims that material remains stand for the people and institutions that produced them, or that genetic change somehow caused cultural change. Our challenge is to understand the worlds that made great projects like the building of Stonehenge or Mycenae possible. The radiocarbon revolution made the old view that the architecture of Mycenae influenced the building of Stonehenge untenable. But the recent use of 'big data' and of genetic histories have led archaeology back to a worldview where 'big problems' are assumed to require 'big solutions'.
Making an animated plea for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions, the authors consider how life was made possible by living in the local and materially distinct worlds of the period. By considering how people once built connections between each other through their production and use of things, their movement between and occupancy of places, and their treatment of the dead, we learn about the kinds of identities that people constructed for themselves. Stonehenge did not require an architect from Mycenae for it to be built, but the builders of Stonehenge and Mycenae would have shared a mutual recognition of the kinds of humans that they were, and the kinds of practices these monuments were once host to.
Автор: Reszke Название: Return Of The Jew ISBN: 1618113089 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781618113085 Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan) Рейтинг: Цена: 3326.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: Traces the appearance of a new generation of Jews in Poland that followed the fall of the communist regime. Today more and more Poles are discovering their Jewish heritage and beginning to seek a means of associating with Judaism and Jewish culture. Reszke analyses this new generation, addressing the question of whether there can be authentic Jewish life in Poland after fifty years of oppression.
Автор: Pat Thane Название: Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present ISBN: 1107612500 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781107612501 Издательство: Cambridge Academ Рейтинг: Цена: 4277.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: This clear, comprehensive survey of the history of the UK covers the twentieth to the early twenty-first century. It explores how, why and to what extent the nation has changed, particularly examining the shifting inequalities between rich and poor, men and women, and people of different cultural backgrounds, ages and regions.
Автор: Stephen Shennan Название: The First Farmers of Europe : An Evolutionary Perspective ISBN: 1108435211 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781108435215 Издательство: Cambridge Academ Рейтинг: Цена: 4435.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: The book presents the latest research on the spread of farming by archaeologists and geneticists. It shows that it resulted from a population expansion from present-day Turkey and explains how this took place. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in archaeology, anthropology and the evolutionary social sciences more generally.
Автор: Bradley W. Hart Название: George Pitt-Rivers and the Nazis ISBN: 1472569954 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781472569950 Издательство: Bloomsbury Academic Рейтинг: Цена: 19008.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание:
George Pitt-Rivers began his career as one of Britain's most promising young anthropologists, conducting research in the South Pacific and publishing articles in the country's leading academic journals. With a museum in Oxford bearing his family name, Pitt-Rivers appeared to be on track for a sterling academic career that might even have matched that of his grandfather, one of the most prominent archaeologists of his day.
By the early 1930s, however, Pitt-Rivers had turned from his academic work to politics. Writing a series of books attacking international communism and praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Pitt-Rivers fell into the circles of the anti-Semitic far right. In 1937 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and personally met Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis. With the outbreak of war in 1940 Pitt-Rivers was arrested and interned by the British government on the suspicion that he might harm the war effort by publicly sharing his views, effectively ending his academic career.
This book traces the remarkable career of a man who might have been remembered as one of Britain's leading 20th century anthropologists but instead became involved in a far-right milieu that would result in his professional ruin and the relegation of most of his research to margins of scientific history. At the same time, his wider legacy would persist far beyond the academic sphere and can be found to the present day.
Описание: In 1585, at the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures. This book constitutes the first critical English-language edition of the 1585 work, the original of which was discovered in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid after the Second World War. The book provides a translation of the text, which is not a continuous narrative, but rather more than 600 distichs or brief couplets on subjects such as gender, child rearing, religion, medicine, eating, horses, writing, ships and seafaring, architecture, and music and drama. In addition, the book includes a substantive introduction and other editorial material to explain the background and also to make comparisons with present-day Japanese life. Overall, the book represents an important primary source for understanding a particularly challenging period of history and its connection to contemporary Europe and Japan.
Описание: SHARE is an international survey designed to answer the societal challenges that face us due to rapid population ageing. How do Europeans age? Under which circumstances do older people and their families live, how healthy and active are they, and how did the crisis affect them? The authors of this multidisciplinary book have taken a first step toward answering these questions based on the recent SHARE data including a new social networks module.
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