From a highly decorated general, a brilliant new way of understanding war and its role in the twenty-first century.Drawing on his vast experience as a commander during the first Gulf War, and in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, General Rupert Smith gives us a probing analysis of modern war. He demonstrates why today’s conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events, and makes clear why the current model of total war has failed in Iraq, Afghanistan, an...

The annual collections in the History of Technology series look at the history of technological discovery and change, exploring the relationship of technology to other aspects of life and showing how technological development is affected by the society in which it occurred.

The rich life Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is featured here: his work as a doctor, his novels and journalistic writings, his support of Spiritualism and his defence of fairies. This is a unique set for the 150th anniversary of his birth. After his early years in medicine, the writing talents of Arthur Conan Doyle took over. Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger were among his successes. David Timson, an actor and director who has read the complete Sherlock Holmes collection for Na...

The sweeping true story of how the steam engine changed the world, from the acclaimed author of Miracle CureIf all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line—until the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress.In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, W...

The companion volume for the award-winning PBS and BBC series from "one of the most intriguing minds in the western world" ( The Washington Post).The Day the Universe Changed presents a sweeping view of the history of science, technology, and human civilization and examines the moments in history when a change in knowledge radically altered man's understanding of himself and the world around him.James Burke examines eight periods in history ...

In a world of supercomputers, genetic engineering, and fiber optics, technological creativity is ever more the key to economic success. But why are some nations more creative than others, and why do some highly innovative societies--such as ancient China, or Britain in the industrial revolution--pass into stagnation? Beginning with a fascinating, concise history of technological progress, Mokyr sets the background for his analysis by tracing the major inventions and innovations that have t...

An essential new history of ancient Ireland and the Irish, written as an engrossing detective storyAbout eighty million people today can trace their descent back to the occupants of Ireland. But where did the occupants of the island themselves come from and what do we even mean by “Irish” in the first place?This is the first major attempt to deal with the core issues of how the Irish came into being. J. P. Mallory emphasizes that the Irish did not have a single origin, but ...

Civil engineering produces the structures of all human settlements worldwide and is a vital discipline for many aspects modern life, underlying housing, transport, and our major areas and buildings related to work, study, and leisure. In this Very Short Introduction, David Muir Wood demonstrates the nature and importance of civil engineering not only in the history of civilization and urbanization, but its range of facets today, and its challenges for the future. Beginning with th...

Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - th...

A personal and lyrical rediscovery of the history of England through archaeology and the imagination.History thrives on stories. TIME'S ANVIL explores archaeology's influence on what such stories say, how they are told, who tells them and how we listen.In a dazzlingly wide-ranging exploration, Richard Morris casts fresh light on three quarters of a million years of history in the place we now think of as England. Drawing upon genres that are usually pursued...

This ambitious and innovative book sets out to establish a new understanding of human aggression and conflict in the distant past. Examining the evidence of warfare in prehistoric times and in the early historical period, John Carman and Anthony Harding throw fresh light on the motives and methods of the combatants. This study marks a significant new step in this fascinating and neglected subject, and sets the agenda for many years to come. By integrating archaeological an...

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and i...