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.
These are the books she had in her Research collection
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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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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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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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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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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. -
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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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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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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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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A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.
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The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1
Jacob Burckhardt
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is an 1860 work on the Italian Renaissance by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Together with his History of the Renaissance in Italy (1867) it is counted among the classics of Renaissance historiography.
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Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus
Thomas Cahill
How did an obscure rabbi from a backwater of the Roman Empire come to be the central figure in Western Civilization? Did his influence in fact change the world? These are the questions Thomas Cahill addresses in his subtle and engaging investigation into the life and times of Jesus.
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The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey From the Big Bang to the Big Brain
William H. Calvin
Written in the form of a scientists diary of a two-week float trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. There we find rocks of great age, fossils, dwellings of Stone Age peoples, and experience the land much as our ancestors did during all those untold generations in the dimly remembered world from which we somehow took flight.
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The Big Picture
Sean Carroll
Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?
In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. -
Disease and History
Frederick F. Cartwright
Arising from collaboration between a doctor and a historian, Disease and History offers the general reader a wide-ranging and most accessible account of some of the ways in which disease has left its often dramatic mark on the past.
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Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society
Bernard Chapais
At some point in the course of evolution―from a primeval social organization of early hominids―all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives―chimpanzees and bonobos―and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think.
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A Glorious Age in Africa: The Story of Three Great African Empires
Daniel Chu and Elliott Skinner
A review of 800 years of African history, focusing on the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, and revealing the military, educational, and political supremacy during that time.
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Space, Time and ManL A Prehistorian's View
Grahame Clark
Human understanding of time and space has been developing since the most primitive societies began to record an awareness of their history and environment. Grahame Clark, a distinguished prehistorian, describes that process and its extension with the emergence of technology, social organisation and the capacity for abstract thought. Moving from preliterate to civilised societies, he charts the various phases of transition, marked most notably by the growth of geographical discovery culminating in the circumnavigation of the earth, and the growth of a deeper, more critical view of human history. Our own period takes this fascinating account into the exploration of outer space and the search for an understanding of man's place in the cosmos.
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1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Eric H. Cline
In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. But the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused such widespread breakdown. How did it happen?
In this major new account of the causes of this "First Dark Ages," Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries.
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The Maya
Michael D. Coe
The Maya has long been established as the best, most readable introduction to the New World’s greatest ancient civilization. Coe and Houston update this classic by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader and student.
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To America and Around the World: The Logs of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan
Christopher Columbus, Antonio Pigafetta, and Adolph Caso
This book contains the daily logs kept by Columbus—himself—and by Magellans’s scribe, Antonio Pigafetta, on their fateful voyages to the unknown Americas and subsequently around the world.
These voyages have unequivocally changed and impacted on the western world like no other event except for the advent of Jesus Christ.
The logs herewith are the first translations into English, and read like any modern adventure story such as Around the World in 80 Days.
In one of his essays, Adolph Caso takes on the polemics surrounding the persona of Columbus—especially the issues of Leif Ericson—with the forged Vinland Map; the issue of Columbus being a Jewishs—with the claims that Columbus secretly worked his Jewish brothers to find a Jewish state in the New World; and whether America should have a Columbus Day. Giacomeelli, on the other hand, tells the story of how America got its name. -
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations
Arthur Cotterell
A wide-ranging, alphabetically arranged overview of the prehistoric world, spanning East and West to study and compare ancient civilizations.
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Sumer and the Sumerians
Harriet Crawford
Mesopotamia produced one of the best-known ancient civilizations, with a literate, urban culture and highly-developed political institutions. Writing primarily for a non-specialist audience but drawing on the most up-to-date historical and archaeological sources, Harriet Crawford reviews the extraordinary social and technological developments in the region over a period of two millennia, from 3800 to 2000 BC. She describes the physical environment and discusses architecture, trade and industry, the development of writing, and changes in social and political structures.
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Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
Antonio Damasio
Joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe—these and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza devoted much of his life's work examining how these emotions supported human survival, yet hundreds of years later the biological roots of what we feel remain a mystery. Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio—whose earlier books explore rational behavior and the notion of the self—rediscovers a man whose work ran counter to all the thinking of his day, pairing Spinoza's insights with his own innovative scientific research to help us understand what we're made of, and what we're here for.
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African Civilization Revisited: From Aniquity to Modern Times
Basil Davidson
This Book Is Concerned With the story of Africa from antiquity to modern times, as told in the chronicles and records of chiefs and kings, travellers and merchant-adventures, poets and pirates and priests, soldiers and persons of learning.
Framed and introduced as a continuous narrative based on what was thought and written at the time, African Civilization Revisited is designed to illustrate the drama and variety, challenge and achievement of humankind in Africa's long history.
It is offered as a contribution to the fuller understanding of Africa today, as well as a guide to the Africa of yesterday and of long ago.
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The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State
Basil Davidson
Basil Davidson is among the most widely read and respected of Africa's historians, and is, as Roland Oliver, author of The Cambridge History of Africa, has observed, "the one best trusted in Black Africa itself." Now, in this often brilliant, unfailingly provocative work, he traces the roots of Africa's independence movement and puts the continent's present-day political instability into historical perspective. Emerging from foreign rule in the 1950s, the African people looked hopefully toward a future of independence and self-determination. But today Africa is a continent in crisis. The root cause, argues Davidson, lies in a historical irony--Africa's liberators, reluctant to embrace Africa's own history, chose to form nation-states based on fundamentally flawed European models. Thus, the sectarian strife of Europe was reproduced in Africa, compromising the new nations almost from the moment of their birth. Filled with stimulating insights, The Black Man's Burden tackles some of the most vexing and fundamental questions of our time. Davidson begins with an inquiry into the pathology of nationalism and tribalism, and shows how they have collided in modern Africa. He demonstrates how the colonial legacy deformed (almost from the start) the project of African liberation. For African freedom fighters, mostly schooled in Western ways, could only imagine an African future inspired by the very West whose shackles they sought to break. Even the language of their discourse was derived from the West. Thus, they turned their backs on whatever might have proved useful and usable from their own African heritage. The creation of nation-states, like the Janus-faced nature of nationalism itself, proved, in the event, to be not so much liberating as suffocating. The state, Davidson argues, became a monster, its ever-inflating bureaucracy enrolled in the service of a particular family or ethnic group or tribe or alliance of tribes. Others, in an effort to resist the depredations of the state (or in a refusal to recognize its legitimacy), sought refuge in networks of tribal solidarity and community. Intelligent, passionate, sophisticated, Davidson explores the evolution of nationalism as it has unfolded in both Africa and Europe. He sheds light into obscure corners, combines scholarship with enthusiasm, and accomplishes that rare feat of turning the reader inside out in order to view the world with fresh eyes. He concludes with a reflection on movements of renewal and democracy that are now pushing their way across the continent.
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Human Sacrifice in History and Today
Nigel Davies
A detailed account of the widespread practice of human sacrifice in virtually every civilization throughout history--including its continued practice today--explores the religious and philosophic thought underlying one of humankind's most startling traditions
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The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Richard Dawkins
A renowned scientist and author of The Selfish Gene provides a sweeping chronicle of more than four billion years of life on Earth, shedding new light on evolutionary theory and history, sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical disperal, and other topics.
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The Symbolic Species: The Co-evololution of Language and the Brain
Terrance W. Deacon
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.
Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human. -
First Life: Discovering the Connections Between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began
David Deamer
This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life’s connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. These in turn provided an essential compartment in which more complex molecules assumed new functions required for the origin of life and the beginning of evolution. Deamer takes us from the vivid and unpromising chaos of the Earth four billion years ago up to the present and his own laboratory, where he contemplates the prospects for generating synthetic life. Engaging and accessible, First Life describes the scientific story of astrobiology while presenting a fascinating hypothesis to explain the origin of life.
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Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
Frans De Waal
It’s no secret that humans and apes share a host of traits, from the tribal communities we form to our irrepressible curiosity. We have a common ancestor, scientists tell us, so it’s natural that we act alike. But not all of these parallels are so appealing: the chimpanzee, for example, can be as vicious and manipulative as any human.
Yet there’s more to our shared primate heritage than just our violent streak. In Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal, one of the world’s great primatologists and a renowned expert on social behavior in apes, presents the provocative idea that our noblest qualities—generosity, kindness, altruism—are as much a part of our nature as are our baser instincts. After all, we share them with another primate: the lesser-known bonobo. As genetically similar to man as the chimpanzee, the bonobo has a temperament and a lifestyle vastly different from those of its genetic cousin. Where chimps are aggressive, territorial, and hierarchical, bonobos are gentle, loving, and erotic (sex for bonobos is as much about pleasure and social bonding as it is about reproduction).
