Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to m...
New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.
New Guinea’s laughing sickness, transmitted by cannibalism and caused by a slow-acting virus from which no one has ever recovered. Kuru was on its way to exterminating New Guinea’s Foré tribe of 20,00...
Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial...
Nations and individuals accept national and individual responsibility to take action to solve the problem, or else deny responsibility by self-pity, blaming others, and assuming the role of victim.
Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant...
几乎在世界的每个角落，我的那些搞考古学的朋友都在尽力说服政府了解考古学的实用价值。他们千方百计地想让提供科研经费的机构明白对过去社会命运的研究能帮助我们了解今天同一地区将会发生什么问题。而最重要的是，...
For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious educ...
We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
People with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.
The shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention f...
Bonobo).
History is not just one damn fact after another, as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
The Viking expansion is a good example of what is termed an auto-catalytic process. In chemistry the term catalysis means the speeding-up of a chemical reaction by an added ingredient, such as an enzy...
Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utter...
In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populatio...
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the fi...
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