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Author Morgan reveals how early Muslim advancements in science and culture lay the cornerstones of the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modern Western society. As he chronicles the Golden Ages of Islam, beginning in 570 a.d. with the birth of Muhammad, and resonating today, he introduces scholars like Ibn Al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, Al-Tusi, Al-Khwarizmi, and Omar Khayyam--empirical thinkers who revolutionized the mathematics, astronomy, and...
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"The invention of the aeroplane was both the realization of an age-old human fantasy and a portent of a great new future. This book tells the story of the ways in which powered flight captured the imagination of writers, artists, and intellectuals and helped to shape new visions of the world."--BOOK JACKET
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Taking aim at such books as Machiavelli's The Prince and Hitler's Mein Kampf, Wiker shows how these authors' perverse ideologies not only have led to past atrocities like war and genocide, but also how their philosophies are still popular and damaging today. --from publisher description
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"Why did Rome fall - and what can it teach us about the decline of the West today? A historian and a political economist investigate. Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic...
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"America will remain the world's only superpower for the foreseeable future. But what sort of superpower? What role should America play in the world? What role do you want America to play? Ian Bremmer argues that Washington's directionless foreign policy has become prohibitively expensive and increasingly dangerous. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers have stumbled from crisis to crisis in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine...
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"More than any other year in the last millennium, 1776 is the year that made us who we are. It was an astonishing year of innovation and upheaval, and the world has not been the same since. In this book, Andrew Wilson makes this case by identifying seven distinctives of contemporary society that trace their roots, in some significant way, to 1776. Wilson contends that our society is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian,...
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"This book solves one of the great puzzles of history: why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the world? Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita explains the consolidation of power in the West through a single, little noticed event: the 1132 Concordat of Worms. Bueno de Mesquita makes a deeply researched and persuasive case that the Concordat changed the terms of competition between churches and nation-states, incentivizing...
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People who are anonymous and whose lives are usually ignored in traditional historical accounts are no less important than more prominent individuals in influencing the flow of events. These ordinary, but often heroic, people are the focus of this course. Each of the 48 lectures looks at history from a nontraditional perspective, that of the weak and marginalized-- the poor, sick, disabled, and elderly, as well as the refugees, slaves, women, children,...
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In Great Books, Denby lives the common adult fantasy of returning to school with some worldly knowledge and experience of life. A gifted story-teller, he leads us on a glorious tour - by turns eloquent, witty, and moving - through the works themselves and through his experiences as a middle-aged man among freshmen. He recounts his failures and triumphs as a reader and student (taking an exam led to a hilarious near-breakdown). He celebrates his rediscovery...