The Earth Transformed: An Untold History is a 2023 non-fiction book by English historian Peter Frankopan. It discusses the interactions between human societies and the environment throughout history.
Frankopan argues that droughts, volcanic eruptions, the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period and contemporary climate change impacted and coincided with societal change, such as the Classic Maya collapse and expansion of the Mongol Empire. [1]
Walter Scheidel gave the book a positive review in Financial Times . [1] The Times [2] and Geographical [3] also published positive reviews. Felipe Fernández-Armesto wrote a balanced review, [4] while Geoff Mann critically reviewed the book. [5]
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian merchant, explorer, and navigator from the Republic of Florence, from whose name the term "America" is derived.
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.
Martin Waldseemüller was a German cartographer and humanist scholar. Sometimes known by the Latinized form of his name, Hylacomylus, his work was influential among contemporary cartographers. He and his collaborator Matthias Ringmann are credited with the first recorded usage of the word America to name a portion of the New World in honour of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Waldseemüller was also the first to map South America as a continent separate from Asia, the first to produce a printed globe and the first to create a printed wall map of Europe. A set of his maps printed as an appendix to the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geography is considered to be the first example of a modern atlas.
Physical geography is one of the three main branches of geography. Physical geography is the branch of natural science which deals with the processes and patterns in the natural environment such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. This focus is in contrast with the branch of human geography, which focuses on the built environment, and technical geography, which focuses on using, studying, and creating tools to obtain,analyze, interpret, and understand spatial information. The three branches have significant overlap, however.
Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies was a British submarine lieutenant-commander who authored books claiming that the Chinese sailed to America before Columbus. Historians have rejected Menzies' theories and assertions and have categorised his work as pseudohistory.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a British professor of history and author of several popular works, notably on cultural and environmental history.
Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics. In 2006 his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year. He is the coauthor of four books, and contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired.
Matthew Restall is a historian of Colonial Latin America. He is an ethnohistorian, a Mayanist, a scholar of the conquest, colonization, and the African diaspora in the Americas, and an historian of popular music. Restall has areas of specialization in Yucatán and Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. He is a member of the New Philology school of colonial Mexican history and the founder of a related school, the New Conquest History. He is currently Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory (2017–18), a former editor of Ethnohistory journal (2007–17), a former senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (2017–22), editor of the book series Latin American Originals, and co-editor of the Cambridge Latin American Studies book series. He also writes books on the history of popular music.
Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian, archaeologist, and Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history.
Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award is an annual award given to the best business book of the year as determined by the Financial Times. It aims to find the book that has "the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues". The award was established in 2005 and is worth £30,000. Beginning in 2010, five short-listed authors each receive £10,000, previously it was £5,000.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is a 2015 non-fiction book written by Peter Frankopan, a historian at the University of Oxford. A new abridged edition was illustrated by Neil Packer. The full text is divided into 25 chapters. The author combines the development of the world with the Silk Road.
Peter Frankopan is a British historian, writer, and hotelier. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is best known for his 2015 book The Silk Roads.
Liberalism: A Counter-History is a 2005 book by Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo, first published in English in 2011. In the book, Losurdo examines the inner contradictions of the highly influential history of liberalism and its political tradition. Key liberal thinkers who are discussed include John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke.
Amerigo Vespucci's Letter from Seville, written to his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, describes experiences on Alonso de Ojeda's May 1499 voyage. Vespucci's findings during the Age of Discovery led Spain people to believe that North and South America were not connected to Asia, which was a common belief at the time and was even held by Vespucci himself. Despite the surrounding controversy among many historians about which Vespucci letters were real, and which ones were forged, this particular letter of Vespucci's is notable for its detailed description of the Brazilian coast and its inhabitants.
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World is a 2017 book by Catherine Nixey. In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge. The book was an international bestseller, was translated into 12 languages and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. The New York Times called it a “ballista-bolt of a book”. The book received positive reviews from academics such as Peter Frankopan, professor of Global History at Oxford University, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, and others who praised its style and originality. It received criticism from some scholars of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, who accused it of telling a simplistic, polemical narrative and exaggerating the extent to which early Christians suppressed aspects of older Greek and Roman cultures.
Richard Kerbaj is a BAFTA-winning, twice Emmy-nominated filmmaker, writer and multi-award winning print journalist. Kerbaj specialized in investigating crime and national security-related stories during his 20 year career at newspapers in Australia and Britain.
Cuba: An American History is a historical book by Ada Ferrer which was published in 2022 by Thorndike Press.