Cynthia Stokes Brown was an avid reader and researcher. This collection is a digital representation of her personal library with the books categorized as Cynthia had them on the bookshelves in her home.
You can view the collection in it entirety or you can view them by category
American History | Big History| World History | Research | Poetry
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The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World
Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack
"Most people assume either that Earth was created as-is a few thousand years ago, or else that it's a lonely rock in endless space--although both assumptions are wrong. Meanwhile, global problems like climate destabilization, economic chaos, religious-justified violence, and exhaustion of planetary resources are escalating. These facts are connected. The new universe picture described in this book provides a believable new origin story and cosmic context, which help us to think for the first time on large enough time and size scales to see how to keep Earth and the human species healthy long into the future"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
Diane Ackerman
"Humans have subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness. We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity ... Ackerman [explores] our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating--perhaps saving--our future and that of our fellow creatures."--Jacket.
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Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History
Michael Adas
Introduces readers to the cross-cultural study of ancient and classical civilizations. The book is divided into two sections, the first examining the ongoing interaction between ancient agrarian and nomadic societies and the second focusing on regional patterns in the dissemination of ideas.
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The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
Robert C. Allen
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 - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.
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A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves
Walter Alvarez
Big History, the field that integrates traditional historical scholarship with scientific insights to study the full sweep of our universe, has so far been the domain of historians. Famed geologist Walter Alvarez―best known for the “Impact Theory” explaining dinosaur extinction―has instead championed a science-first approach to Big History. Here he wields his unique expertise to give us a new appreciation for the incredible occurrences―from the Big Bang to the formation of supercontinents, the dawn of the Bronze Age, and beyond―that have led to our improbable place in the universe.
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The Mountains of Saint Francis: Discovering the Geologic Events That Shaped Our Earth
Walter Alvarez
Modern geologists, Walter Alvarez among them, showed in the last decades of the twentieth century that the history of our planet has witnessed events profoundly more dramatic than even the most spectacular chapters in human history. More violent than wars, more life altering than revolutions―understanding the geologic events that have shaped the Earth's surface is the quest and the passion of geologists. In the knowledgeable and graceful prose of Alvarez, general readers are led to explore the many mysteries that our planet guards.
The author has chosen Italy as a microcosm in which to explore this amazing past for several reasons. First, it is the land where the earliest geologists learned how to read the history of the Earth, written in nature’s rock archives. Second, it is where Alvarez and his Italian geological friends have continued to decipher the rock record, uncovering more historical episodes from the Earth’s past. And third, the lovely land of Italy is unusually rich in geological treasures and offers examples of the key processes that have created the landscapes of the entire world.
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T. Rex and the Crater of Doom
Walter Alvarez
Sixty-five million years ago, a comet or asteroid larger than Mount Everest slammed into the Earth, inducing an explosion equivalent to the detonation of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Vaporized detritus blasted through the atmosphere upon impact, falling back to Earth around the globe. Disastrous environmental consequences ensued: a giant tsunami, continent-scale wildfires, darkness, and cold, followed by sweltering greenhouse heat. When conditions returned to normal, half the plant and animal genera on Earth had perished.
This horrific chain of events is now widely accepted as the solution to a great scientific mystery: what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? Walter Alvarez, one of the Berkeley scientists who discovered evidence of the impact, tells the story behind the development of the initially controversial theory. It is a saga of high adventure in remote locations, of arduous data collection and intellectual struggle, of long periods of frustration ended by sudden breakthroughs, of friendships made and lost, and of the exhilaration of discovery that forever altered our understanding of Earth's geological history.
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Who Built America: Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, Volume I: From Conquest and Colonization Through Reconstruction and the Great Uprising of 1877
American Social History Project and Herbert G. Gutman
At last, an American history about working Americans: what they thought, what they did, what happened to them. Volume One takes us from conquest and colonization through industrial expansion, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Uprising of 1877
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Who Built America: Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, Volume II: From the Gilded Age to the Present
American Social History Project and Herbert G. Gutman
At last, an American history about working Americans: what they thought, what they did, what happened to them. Volume Two takes us from the Gilded Age to the Present.
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The Human Record: Sources of Global History, Volume I : to 1700
Alfred J. Andrea and James H. Overfield
Unlike some other world history texts that center on the West, The Human Record provides balanced coverage of the global past. The book features both written and artifactual sources that are placed in their full historical contexts through introductory essays, footnotes, and focus questions. The text sheds light on the experiences of women and non-elite groups while maintaining overall balance and a focus on the major patterns of global historical developments through the ages.
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Manzanar
John Armor and Peter Wright
Ansel Adams photographs, an essay by John Hersey, and historical commentary document the day-to-day life in a World War II internment-camp
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Earth: Our Crowded Spaceship
Isaac Asimov
Discusses the problems faced by the Earth's inhabitants as population increases and energy sources, food, and land become more scarce.
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History of the United States: From the Discovery of the Continent
George Bancroft
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. -
Secret Chambers: The Inside Story of Cells & Complex Life
Martin Basier
The appearance of the modern plant cell is one of the most deeply puzzling and unlikely steps in the whole history of life, and as Martin Brasier shows in Secret Chambers, decoding this puzzle has been a great adventure that has mainly taken place over the last fifty years. Covering the period from 1 to 2 billion years ago, Brasier presents the modern understanding of the origin of the complex cell, without which there would be nothing on Earth today except bacteria. Indeed, the formation of this cell was a fundamental turning point in the history of life on Earth. Weaving together several threads, Brasier highlights the importance of single-celled forms to marine ecosystems, describes symbiosis and coral reefs, and examines the architecture and beauty of single-celled Foraminifera and what they tell us about evolution. Throughout the book, he interweaves cutting-edge scientific discussions with lively descriptions of his explorations around the world, from the Caribbean Sea and the Egyptian pyramids, to the shores of the great lakes in Canada, and to the reefs and deserts of Australia.
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The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Ibn Battutah
Ibn Battutah - ethnographer, bigrapher, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist - was just twenty-one when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgramage to Mecca . . . He did not return to Morocco for another twenty-nine years, travelling instead through more than forty countries on the modern map, covering seventy-five thousand miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist and gastronome. With this edition by Mackintosh-Smith, Battutah's Travels takes its place alongside other indestructible masterpieces of the travel-writing genre. "Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure."--item description from the publisher
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Birth of he Modern World: 1780-1914
C. A. Bayly
This thematic history of the world from 1780 to the onset of the First World War reveals that the world was far more ‘globalised’ at this time than is commonly thought.
- Explores previously neglected sets of connections in world history.
- Reveals that the world was far more ‘globalised’, even at the beginning of this period, than is commonly thought.
- Sketches the ‘ripple effects’ of world crises such as the European revolutions and the American Civil War.
- Shows how events in Asia, Africa and South America impacted on the world as a whole.
- Considers the great themes of the nineteenth-century world, including the rise of the modern state, industrialisation and liberalism.
- Challenges and complements the regional and national approaches which have traditionally dominated history teaching and writing.
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The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas
Carl L. Becker
This important study of the Declaration of Independence compares early drafts of the Declaration with the final version to discuss what influenced its conception; why it came about; and how it was interpreted by successive generations.
Drawing on key philosophers of the Enlightenment period, such as Descartes, Rousseau, and John Locke, Becker explores the revolutionary tradition in the Western world, which for the American Founding Fathers was inspired heavily by the earlier Civil Wars in England, and the protest writers of pre-Revolutionary France.
Becker’s thought-provoking analysis of the Declaration makes clear its importance to both the students of American history and of liberty. -
The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
Carl L. Becker
Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment.
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The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow and Empathy -- and Why They Matter
Marc Bekoff
"In The Emotional Lives of Animals, Marc Bekoff has pulled together the growing body of scientific evidence that supports the existence of a variety of emotions in other animals, richly illustrated by his own careful observations ... Combining careful scientific methodology with intuition and common sense, this book will be a great tool for those who are struggling to improve the lives of animals in environments where, so often, there is an almost total lack of understanding. I only hope it will persuade many people to reconsider the way they treat animals in the future."--Jane Goodall, from the foreword.
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Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals
Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce
"Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male? Or a rat who refused to push a lever for food when he saw that doing so caused another rat to be shocked? Aren t these clear signs that animals have recognizable emotions and moral intelligence? With Wild Justice Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce unequivocally answer yes. Marrying years of behavioral and cognitive research with compelling and moving anecdotes, Bekoff and Pierce reveal that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility. Animals, in short, are incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals.Sure to be controversial, Wild Justice offers not just cutting-edge science, but a provocative call to rethink our relationship with and our responsibilities toward our fellow animals."--Provided by publisher.
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The Twilight of American Culture
Morris Berman
"Whether examining the corruption at the heart of modern politics, the "Rambification" of popular entertainment or the collapse of our school systems, Berman's analysis makes it clear that there is little we can do as a society to stave off the relentless momentum of the mass-mind culture that grows with each gargantuan corporate merger. Our only recourse, he argues, is cultural preservation, which is a matter of individual conscience, including a refusal to base our lives on profit or consumerism. The possibility for long-term cultural renewal lies in the emergence of a "new monastic individual" not unlike the movement that developed during the early Middle Ages, and that managed to preserve a few precious treasures in anticipation of a new cultural dawn. Twilight of American Culture is a provocative reflection on present dilemmas and future possibilities."--Jacket.
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Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985
Martin Bernal
What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.
The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular. -
Understanding United States Government Growth: An Empirical Analysis of the Postwar Era
William D. Berry and David Lowery
Understanding United States Government Growth develops and tests alternative explanations of government growth since World War II. It opens with an analysis of debate about the causes and consequences of government growth, including the excessive government view that the public sector has grown beyond the scope demanded by citizens due to its own structural defects, and the responsive interpretation that government has gown because it has reacted appropriately to external public demands. The authors review the major political and economic explanations for government growth and criticize earlier empirical attempts to test these explanations. In the second half of the book, they distinguish four components of government growth: growth in the cost of government and growth in the scope of government activities in three domains--transfer payments, domestic purchases, and defense purchases. Both responsive and excessive explanations of each of these components of growth are developed and tested to allow an evaluation of the validity of the two contrasting views about big government.
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Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction
Susan Blackmore
"Consciousness, 'the last great mystery for science', has now become a hot topic. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories using illustrations, lively cartoons, and experiments. Topics include vision and attention, theories of self and will, experiments on action and awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs."--Publisher's description.
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The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History
J. M. Blaut
This influential book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs of our time--that Europe rose to modernity and world dominance due to unique qualities of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit, and that progress for the rest of the world resulted from the diffusion of European civilization. J. M. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. Blaut traces the colonizer's model of the world from its 16th-century origins to its present form in theories of economic development, modernization, and new world order.
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A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
Philipp Blom
A Wicked Company tells the remarkable story of Baron Thierry Holbach's Parisian salon, an epicenter of freethinking that brought together the greatest minds of the 18th century. Over wine-soaked dinner parties, the finest intellectuals of the Western world—figures such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, and Benjamin Franklin—matched wits and scandalized one another with their own ever-more-provocative ideas. Writers of genius all, full of wit and courage (but also personal contradictions, doubts, conflicts of conscience, and their fair share of open arguments and love affairs), this group of friends embodied an astonishing radicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that its bracing, liberating, humanist vision has still not been fully realized. As acclaimed historian Philipp Blom shows, these thinkers' analysis of our culture remains as valid as it was then, and has lost little of its potential to shock—or to force us to confront with new eyes debates about our society and its future.
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Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Howard Bloom
Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research and development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, feathered flying lizards gathered in flocks, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world. Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic age, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.
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We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust
Jacob Boas
The five diarists in this book did not survive the war. But their words did. Each diary reveals one voice, one teenager coping with the impossible. We see David Rubinowicz struggling against fear and terror. Yitzhak Rudashevski shows us how Jews clung to culture, to learning, and to hope, until there was no hope at all. Moshe Ze'ev Flinker is the voice of religion, constantly seeking answers from God for relentless tragedy. Eva Heyman demonstrates the unquenchable hunger for life that sustained her until the very last moment. And finally, Anne Frank reveals the largest truth they all left for us: Hitler could kill millions, but he could not destroy the human spirit. These stark accounts of how five young people faced the worst of human evil are a testament, and an inspiration, to the best of the human soul.
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Stephen Hawking's Universe: An Introduction to the Most Remarkable Scientist of Our Time
John Boslough
Here is an intimate glimpse of the greatest scientist of our day, the brilliant physicist confined to a wheelchair whose A Brief History of Time has become the first worldwide scientific bestseller of the century. The story of Stephen Hawking's relentless quest for the secret of the origins of the universe will change forever the way you look at the stars . . . and your place among them.
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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence.
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The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 3
Fernand Braudel
Volume III investigates what Braudel terms "world-economies" -- the economic dominance of a particular city at different periods of history, from Venice to Amsterdam, London, New York.
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The Anatomy of Revolution
Crane Brinton
The definitive, hugely influential comparative history of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions from a renowned American scholar. "Classic" and "famous," The Anatomy of Revolution examines the patterns and processes that all revolutions share.
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What Should We Be Worried About? Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night
John Brockman
Posing the question "What should we be worried about?" to one hundred fifty of the world's greatest minds, this collection of responses reveals what about the present or the future worries each of them the most.
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The Flowering of New England 1815-1865
Van Wyck Brooks
"This is the first of a number of volumes in which I hope to sketch the literary history of the United States ... My subject is the New England mind as it has found expression in the lives and works of writers."--Preface.
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Big History: From The Big Bang to the Present
Cynthia Stokes Brown
Big History interweaves different disciplines of knowledge, drawing on both the natural sciences and the human sciences, to offer an all-encompassing account of history on Earth. This new edition is more relevant than ever before, as we increasingly grapple with accelerating rates of change and, ultimately, the legacy we will bequeath to future generations. Here is a path-breaking portrait of our world, from the birth of the universe from a single point the size of an atom to life on a twenty-first-century planet inhabited by seven billion people.
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Human Universals
Donald E. Brown
This book explores physical and behavioral characteristics that can be considered universal among all cultures, all people. It presents cases demonstrating universals, looks at the history of the study of universals, and presents an interesting study of a hypothetical tribe, The Universal People.
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Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
Lester R. Brown
Explores the geopolitics of food scarcity. Presents an effort to raise public understanding of the challenges of food shortage and be an inspiration to action.
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Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
Lester R. Brown
"Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives."--Back cover.
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The Great Transition: Shifiting from Fossil Fuiels to Solar and Wind Energy
Lester R. Brown
Overview: The great energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is under way. As oil insecurity deepens, the extraction risks of fossil fuels rise, and concerns about climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new world energy economy is emerging. The old economy, fueled by oil, natural gas, and coal is being replaced with one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The Great Transition details the accelerating pace of this global energy revolution. As many countries become less enamored with coal and nuclear power, they are embracing an array of clean, renewable energies. Whereas solar energy projects were once small-scale, largely designed for residential use, energy investors are now building utility-scale solar projects. Strides are being made: some of the huge wind farm complexes under construction in China will each produce as much electricity as several nuclear power plants, and an electrified transport system supplemented by the use of bicycles could reshape the way we think about mobility.
