WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2008'The world's most controversial classicist debunks our movie-style myths about the Roman town with meticulous scholarship and propulsive energy' Laura Silverman, Daily MailThe ruins of Pompeii, buried by an explosion of Vesuvius in 79 CE, offer the best evidence we have of everyday life in the Roman empire. This remarkable book rises to the challenge of making sense of those remains, as well as exploding many myths: the very date of the eruption, probab...

Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us.We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens?In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we're going.Sapiens is a thrilling account of humankind's extraordinary history - from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age - and ...

In Jared Diamond's follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Diamond is also the author of Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions a...

In this fully revised and updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower, and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Focusing their answers through the historical legacies--Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the massacre near Tiananmen...

In the 19th century Europe changed more rapidly and radically than during any prior period. This volume offers an approach to understanding one of the most complex periods of modern history, addressing all the major issues.

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history.

A lively reimagining of how the distant medieval world of war functioned, drawing on the objects used and made by crusaders

This book explores how diverse digital technologies have allowed for new types of heritage-related mobilities, and thereby established a novel set of practices, interventions, and politics in heritage collections, archives, exhibitions, entertainment, preservation, management, commerce, education, restitution, activism, and regulation.

What is the significance and relevance of the concept of 'genocide' today? In this wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews, Adam Jones, one of the world's leading genocide scholars, explores the uses and controversies surrounding the term coined by Raphael Lemkin to describe and prohibit mass atrocities against defined human groups.

What Soldiers Do presents a devastating new perspective on the Greatest Generation and the liberation of France, one in which the US military use the lure of easy, sexually available French women to sell soldiers on the invasion, thus unleashing a "tsunami of male lust" among the war-weary GIs. The resulting chaos-ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease - horrified the battered and demoralized French population and caused serious frictio...