Global History

And the Roots of the Rhythm Remain is like no other. It shows how personalities, events and politics in Havana, Lagos, Buenos Aires, Soweto, Rio and Seville are as colourful and fascinating as anything that took place in Storyville, Harlem, Laurel Canyon or Liverpool. And, moreover, how jazz, r&b and rock 'n' roll would never have happened if it wasn't for sounds emanating from over the horizon and below the equator.

Caught in the crosshairs of Mexico's warring cartels, Juárez is the border city that most brutally exposes the lies that we tell ourselves about globalization, NAFTA, immigration, corruption, and the war on drugs. Once known only as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad and Mogadishu. In this heartbreaking, disturbing, and unforgettable examination, award winning-writer Charles Bowden takes an axe to the myths about the war on drugs—myths perpetuated by Mexico, the U.S. government, and the media.

Experts believe that Brazil, the world's fifth largest country and its seventh largest economy, will be one of the most important global powers by the year 2030. Yet far more attention has been paid to the other rising behemoths: Russia, India, and China. Often ignored and underappreciated, Brazil, according to renowned, award-winning journalist Michael Reid, has finally begun to live up to its potential but faces important challenges before it becomes a nation of substantial global significance.

Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature - issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic - was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: Even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control.

On March 21, 1968, Yasir Arafat and his guerrillas made the fateful decision to break with conventional guerrilla tactics, choosing to stand and fight an Israeli attack on the al-Karama refugee camp in Jordan. They suffered terrible casualties, but they won a stunning symbolic victory that transformed Arafat into an Arab hero and allowed him to launch a worldwide campaign, one that would reshape Cold War diplomacy and revolutionary movements everywhere. In The Global Offensive, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin offers new insights into the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

NASA Astrobiologist and renowned scientist Dr. David Grinspoon brings listeners an optimistic message about humanity's future in the face of climate change. For the first time in Earth's history, our planet is experiencing a confluence of rapidly accelerating changes prompted by one species: Humans. Climate change is only the most visible of the modifications we've made - up until this point, inadvertently - to the planet. And our current behavior threatens not only our own future but that of countless other creatures.

السيرة النبوية لابن هشام أو سيرة ابن هشام هو كتاب في السيرة النبوية للنبي محمد رسول الإسلام ويعد من أهم كتب السيرة النبوية ومصادرها الرئيسية وهو كتاب لأبي محمد عبد الملك بن هشام بن أيوب الحميري البصري المتوفى سنة يرويه عن محمد بن إسحاق وقد أجرى ابن هشام على ابن

Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming - one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this "ghost economy".

What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global best-selling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world. Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

Some historians have called the Seven Years’ War the first true world war, and they make a good point. Ultimately, this globally coordinated war involved five continents and at least 29 states and tribal confederacies, with a casualty toll in the millions and the maps forever altered. As part of the Seven Years’ War, the French and Indian War was the last in a long series of colonial conflicts between the French and British and also changed the map in America. At the end of the war, disputed borders were finally settled, and both empires were left reeling from the costs of war.

Scattered over the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace proposals, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions, and state-building efforts. The conventional story is that these well-meaning attempts at peacemaking were repeatedly, perhaps terminally, thwarted by violence. Through a rich interweaving of reportage, historical narrative, and powerful analysis, Nathan Thrall presents a startling counterhistory.

For 200 years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism’s long journey from its 19th-century roots to today’s fractured political moment.

For more than 10,000 years, humans have been fascinated by a seemingly innocuous plant with bright-colored fruits that bite back when bitten. Ancient New World cultures from Mexico to South America combined these pungent pods with every conceivable meat and vegetable. In Chile Peppers: A Global History, Dave DeWitt, a world expert on chiles, travels from New Mexico across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia chronicling the history, mystery, and mythology of chiles around the world and their abundant uses in 70 mouth-tingling recipes.

The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.

The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: The United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus' 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global US empire.

Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they result in countries stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into inflation, recession and real violence. Author James Rickards concludes that currency wars are as problematic now as they were in 1971 when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Europe and Chinese and currency manipulation are all indicators that we're entering an even more dangerous phase.

In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler described the global predicaments that would pitch the USA into political and economic turmoil in the 21st century - the end of affordable oil, climate irregularities, and flagging economic growth, to name a few. Now, he returns with a book that takes an up-close-and-personal approach to how real people are living now - surviving The Long Emergency as it happens.

Between 1965 and 1985, the world underwent profound social, political, and technological transformations. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States achieved key victories, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but racial tensions and systemic inequalities persisted. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War escalated, igniting widespread anti-war protests and fracturing American trust in government. This disillusionment culminated in the Watergate scandal, leading to President Nixon's resignation in 1974 and reshaping public perception of political leadership.

For many years after its reform and opening in 1978, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That role, reports Howard French, has been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian dominance by building its navy, increasing territorial claims to areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players.

When Ted Turner started out in business, he owned a small billboard company in rural Georgia. Over the decades, he built a multi-billion empire that included CNN, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), MGM studios, and the Atlanta Braves. Risk-taking, careful planning, and steely determination are the hallmarks of this brash, outspoken, and wildly successful media mogul. On the other side of the world, his counterpart—Australian-born Rupert Murdoch—began with one small newspaper and parlayed it into more than 100 newspapers and magazines around the globe.