World History Philosophy

The stock market crash of 1929 didn’t cause the Great Depression by itself, but it is a powerful symbolic starting point to the greatest economic disaster of the 20th century. On that dark day in October 1929, fortunes were lost, and fear of financial insecurity rose throughout the United States and the world. In 1932, the low point of the Depression, as much as a third of Americans were out of work, and even more people were unemployed in other countries. The stock market reached its lowest point ever and wouldn’t rise to its pre-Depression levels for almost 20 years.

The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure-filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter, as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens. From Google Images to Instagram, video games to installation art, this transformation is confusing, liberating and worrying all at once, since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it.

Les grands drames vécus lors d'une guerre relèguent habituellement les événements moins tragiques, au second rang. Bien que ces derniers passent inaperçus durant les combats, ils ne méritent pas moins d'être connus du public à cause du sentiment de bienveillance, de compassion, d'amour et d'innombrables preuves d'humanité dont ils ont fait preuve. Ce livre audio ne s'attarde donc pas sur les protagonistes des grandes batailles.

New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact...and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide listeners on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives.

Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.

This addition to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether it is the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.

Immerse yourself in the history of medicine - a colorful story of skill, serendipity, trial and error, moments of genius, and dogged determination.

America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his best-selling In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen - the US Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842.

From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.

Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy.

L'ordre du Temple était un ordre religieux et militaire issu de la chevalerie chrétienne du Moyen Âge, ses membres étaient appelés les Templiers. Il y eu jusqu'à 15 000 chevaliers. Cet ordre fut créé en 1129, et œuvra à l'accompagnement et à la protection des pèlerins pour Jérusalem dans le contexte de la guerre sainte et des croisades. Il participa activement aux batailles. Il constitua à travers l'Europe un réseau de monastères appelés commanderies.

From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life, seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich.

Long before Australia started to be considered one of the best places in the world to live, it was thought to be completely unlivable. In the 15th century, the European race to claim land began. Despite the fact that Australia was a large landmass, no nation believed it was worth colonizing. The land was claimed by the Netherlands. However, little exploration happened there. Many countries actually believed it to be uninhabitable. However, the Aboriginal populations had already been thriving on the land for millennia.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (1887-1940) was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) is a collection of his speeches, setting out his vision of a united Africa. As an early proponent of the Back-to-Africa movement, he encouraged a sense of pride and self-worth among Africans and the African diaspora. Garvey deplored the view of poverty as a virtue and encourages Blacks to be empowered in every sphere of their lives.

An unbelievable series of events led to the establishment of the Northwest Electro-development Laboratory, later the U.S. Bureau of Mines Albany Research Center. Though the fledgling lab had difficulty securing staff due to World War II, world-renown metallurgist William J. Kroll was hired early on as a consultant after fleeing Nazi occupation. Kroll, who had pioneered a method for producing commercial titanium, worked with his core group of associates to develop malleable zirconium, just as a need arose for the little-known metal.

The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving".

Today, we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500s - of different nationality, age, religion, and class - collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world. Heaven on Earth is an intimate examination of this scientific family.

Liberal democracy is the dominant political ideology in the West today. Taken at face value it suggests an equivalency between its two central components-liberalism and democracy - but as Fred Dallmayr argues here, the two operate in very different registers. The two frequently conflict, endangering our public life. This is evident in the rise of self-centered neo-liberalism as well as autocratic movements in our world today.