Browse Items (24 total)

This book explores the relationship between prehistoric people and their food – what they ate, why they ate it, and how researchers have pieced together the story of past foodways from material traces. Contemporary human food traditions encompass a…

Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was…

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way.…

In this first full history of around-the-world travel, Joyce E. Chaplin brilliantly tells the story of circumnavigation. For almost five hundred years, human beings have been finding ways to circle the Earth—by sail, steam, or liquid fuel; by…

The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory-combined with an increasing desire worldwide for inexpensive toys, clothes, and food-are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs…

This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources, which allow the reader direct…

From Morocco to Iran and the Black Sea to the Red, Water on Sand rewrites the history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Little Ice Age to the Cold War era. As the first holistic environmental history of the region, it shows the intimate…

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and extent. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from…

The history of the twentieth century is most often told through its world wars, the rise and fall of communism, or its economic upheavals. In his startling new book, J. R. McNeill gives us our first general account of what may prove to be the most…

Examining aseries of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davisdis closes the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arroganceand natural incident that…