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The invention of yesterday : a 50,000-year history of human culture, conflict, and connection / Tamim Ansary.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : PublicAffairs, 2019Edition: First editionDescription: vi, 436 pages : illustrations ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781610397964
  • 1610397967
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction -- Part I: Tools, language, and environment. The physical stage -- History begins with language -- Civilization begins with geography -- Trade weaves the networks -- The birth of belief systems -- Part II: One planet, many worlds. Money, math, messaging, management, and might -- Megaempires take the stage -- The lands in between -- When worlds overlap -- World historical monads -- Part III: The table tilts. Out of the north -- Europe on the rise -- The nomads' last roar -- Europe and the long crusades -- The restoration narrative -- The progress narrative -- Part IV: History's hinge. That Columbus moment -- Chain reactions -- After Columbus : the world -- The center does not hold -- Middle world enmeshed -- Ripple effects -- Part V: Enter the machine. The invention explosion -- Our machines, ourselves -- Social constellations in the machine age -- Empires and nation-states -- A world at war -- Part VI: The singularity has three sides. Beyond the nation-state -- Digital era -- The environment -- The big picture.
Summary: "A sweeping global human history that describes the separate beginnings of the world's major civilizations and cultural movements -- Confuscianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Nomadism -- and the dramatic, sometimes ruinous, sometimes transformative effects of their ever closer intertwinement that has brought us to where we are today"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Dr. James Carlson Library NonFiction 909 A617 Available 33111009392438
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 909 A617 Available 33111009727542
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age
Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative.
Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.
Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.

"A sweeping global human history that describes the separate beginnings of the world's major civilizations and cultural movements -- Confuscianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Nomadism -- and the dramatic, sometimes ruinous, sometimes transformative effects of their ever closer intertwinement that has brought us to where we are today"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 409-418) and index.

Introduction -- Part I: Tools, language, and environment. The physical stage -- History begins with language -- Civilization begins with geography -- Trade weaves the networks -- The birth of belief systems -- Part II: One planet, many worlds. Money, math, messaging, management, and might -- Megaempires take the stage -- The lands in between -- When worlds overlap -- World historical monads -- Part III: The table tilts. Out of the north -- Europe on the rise -- The nomads' last roar -- Europe and the long crusades -- The restoration narrative -- The progress narrative -- Part IV: History's hinge. That Columbus moment -- Chain reactions -- After Columbus : the world -- The center does not hold -- Middle world enmeshed -- Ripple effects -- Part V: Enter the machine. The invention explosion -- Our machines, ourselves -- Social constellations in the machine age -- Empires and nation-states -- A world at war -- Part VI: The singularity has three sides. Beyond the nation-state -- Digital era -- The environment -- The big picture.

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