"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

Art historian Sir Kenneth Clark presents an epic examination of Western European culture, defining what he considers to be the crucial phases of its development. This lavish series was hailed as a masterpiece when it was broadcast in 1969. Disc One: Program 1: "Skin of our Teeth" looks at the Dark Ages; the six-hundred years following the fall of the Roman Empire. / Program 2: "Great Thaw" traces the re-awakening of European civilization in the...

"Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and al of recorded history occurred in this warm period--the long summer of the human species. Fagan illuminates the centuries long pattern of human adaptation to the challenges of an ever-changing climate--and how climate change gave rise to civilization"--Back cover.

An expansive journey through the last millennium of human innovation in the Western world profiles the pivotal discoveries, inventions, revolutions, and perspective changes that have shaped the modern world.

"Rome in the East provides an illustrated study of the influence of Near Eastern culture on the Roman world, which overturns received wisdom about Rome as the bastion of European culture. In this controversial and provocative study Warwick Ball presents the story of Rome in the light of Rome's fascination with the East. He explains Rome's obsession with the Eastern world as a fascination of the new world for the old, of the mundane for the exotic,...

"Twenty-five-hundred years ago, civilizations around the world entered a revolutionary new era that overturned old order and laid the foundation for our world today. In the face of massive social changes across three continents, radical new forms of government emerged; mighty wars were fought over trade, religion, and ideology; and new faiths were ruthlessly employed to unify vast empires. The histories of Rome and China, Greece and India--the stories...