This Fleeting World is the smallest book of big history, telling the story of the universe and history of humanity in less than one hundred pages. Prize-winning historian David Christian covers it all in this compact, accessible, and inspiring guide to the history of everything, from stars and empires to cities, the World Wide Web, capitalism, and globalization. David Christian's approach to human history and big history is a call to action, based on a profound and fresh understanding of our place in the universe. This book is essential reading for our time. David Christian asks big questions. Will contemporary challenges will lead to the emergence of a new global system capable of ecological, economic, and political stability? Or is the accelerating pace of change a prelude to a sudden, sharp collapse that will drive many parts of the world back to the productivity levels of the early agrarian era? He presents our origin story and the history of women and men across the entire world, within the framework of the universe explaining, for example, that the chemicals we are made of come from supernovae. He tells the human story as a story of changes: changes in the ways we produce and distribute food, move from place to place, organize ourselves into communities, explore and populate our environment, and both create and respond to crises. He gives us maps of time, history on different temporal-spatial scales, and even offers paths to locate evidence that might challenge his big story. Big history leads to strategies for building a more sustainable world, and Berkshire Publishing is proud to offer this new edition of a big history for our common future. The 2018 edition has been expanded and updated for the general reader; there is also an earlier edition designed for use with AP World History and other courses, which included a teachers' guide.

"In association with University of Washington Libraries and the Henry Art Gallery."

Critically examines the agency and history of long-silenced coolie women and their role in colonial economy and transnational movements.

This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them. The book's range is enormous. It begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with an object from the 21st century which represents the world we live in today. Neil MacGregor's aim is not simply to describe these remarkable things, but to show us their significance - how a stone pillar tells us about a great Indian emperor preaching tolerance to his people, how Spanish pieces of eight tell us about the beginning of a global currency or how an early Victorian tea-set tells us about the impact of empire. Each chapter immerses the reader in a past civilisation accompanied by an exceptionally well-informed guide. Seen through this lens, history is a kaleidoscope - shifting, interconnected, constantly surprising, and shaping our world today in ways that most of us have never imagined. An intellectual and visual feast, it is one of the most engrossing and unusual history books published in years.

Fleeting Things is a reflection on the journey to trust, love and belong. Combining the beauty of prose with the honesty of poetry, this collection reads like a memoir in metaphors. Rachel H draws on her most personal questions about her place in the world, then answers them all in faith and strength. This book was written for anyone who has found home to be a fleeting thing. May it never hold you back.

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way. Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands. Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.

This book tells the story of the daily lives of women industrial workers in World War II shipyards. It focuses on their struggle against the persistence of occupational segregation, the sexual and racial hierarchy of the shipyard work force, and the pervasive emphasis on female sexuality which served as a constant reminder that women were transient and marginal imposters. In addition, Fleeting Opportunities demonstrates that despite the myth that these women yearned to return to their kitchens, in fact many wanted to continue using their wartime skills in the postwar period. However, finding themselves excluded from jobs by union and management, those who continued to work ended up in low-paying, predominantly female occupations.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

The Little Book of Big History breaks down the main themes of Big History into highly informative and accessible parts for all readers to enjoy.

This edition originally published by Berghahn Books. Schopenhauer's treatise on ethics is presented here in E. F. J. Payne’s definitive translation, based on the Hubscher edition (Wiesbaden, 1946-1950). This edition includes an Introduction by David Cartwright, a translator’s preface, biographical note, selected bibliography, and an index. For convenient reference to passages in Kant's work discussed by Schopenhauer, Academy edition numbers have been added.