Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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Ann Laura Stoler

Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870 - 1979 is a fascinating ethnographic history that analyzes how popular resistance actively molded both the form of colonialism and the social, economic, and political experience of the Javanese laboring communities on Sumatra's plantation borders. In a new preface to this edition, Ann Laura Stoler reflects on her book as a historical document, exploring its timing at the cusp of a more general shift in the anthropology of political economy and colonial studies. This volume will prove invaluable to students across a range of disciplines, including not only history and anthropology but political science and sociology.

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Marcus Cowper

You won't find dusty topics and long-dead heroes and villains in the National Geographic History Book. Turn the pages and you'll find documents, letters, journals, telegrams, posters, and artworks that you can literally pull out and examine. See for yourself, with the primary source materials that history buffs love, what really happened and who really did it. Pull out Shakespeare's will and see how he changed his mind about who got what. Examining a facsimile of the Zouche-Nuttall Codex gives you a sense of the turmoil of pre-Columbian Mexico. Take a look at a steamy love letter written by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. Marvel at the beauty of a wall fresco from first-century Pompeii. Read pages from the Gutenberg Bible, the world's first printed book. Examine a "Wanted" poster for Abraham Lincoln's assassin...and more.

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David McCullough

The Pioneers is a celebrated work by David McCullough (Double Pulitzer Winner, Double National Book Award Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

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Richard Seaford

This is an exciting and entirely new synthesis, combining anthropology, political and social history, and the close reading of central Greek texts, to account for two of the most significant features of Homeric epic and Athenian tragedy: the representation of ritual and of codes of reciprocity. Both genres are pervaded by these features, yet each treats them in very different ways. In this book, Dr Seaford shows that these differences cannot be accounted for in merely literary terms, but require a historical explanation. Homer is a product of the city state at an earlier historical stage than is tragedy. It is the growth of the city-state and its concomitant developments - in particular of law and of money, as well as in the practice of ritual - that provide a key to the crystallization of the Homeric narrative tradition, to the specificity of tragedy, and to certain features of the thought of the period. In the case of reciprocity, again whether the positive reciprocity associated with gift exchange or the hostile reciprocity of revenge - the systematic distinctions between Homer and tragedy can be explained only from a historical perspective. In its characteristic movement tragedy reflects and confirms the transition from one kind of society towards another: from a network of reciprocal relations, characteristic of societies where the state is weak or absent, to the organization of citizens around a single centre or series of centres - the institutions and cults of the city-state. Challenging, thoroughly lucid, and at times controversial, this lively, original yet accessible work is the first to attempt to understand the development of early Greek literature from the perspective of state formation. It should make enlivening and important reading for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the history or the literature of classical Greece. All Greek is translated.