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"An intuitive approach to world history from a leader in the field. McNeill's Webs of Humankind presents a clear, intuitive foundation for teaching the introductory world history course by highlighting the webs of interaction that have connected humans, from the first faint traces of cooperation as a species to the global web that envelops our present world. As they develop over time, these webs incorporate the many ways in which cultures, peoples, and ecosystems connect and influence each other. McNeill also develops history skills by helping students understand how historians use evidence. He alerts students throughout to the types of evidence in play, the biases and uncertainties of the evidence, and what can be inferred from the evidence. A well-written and integrated history, Webs of Humankind provides a brief and approachable introduction to world history"--

"This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them"--Provided by publisher

Three giant-sized mammals, bison, African elephants, and sperm whales, faced sustained hunting in the 19th century. Demand for hides, ivory, and whale oil, all of which were useful in industrial production, animated the hunts. Most of the industrial production in question took place in the northeastern United States, while the hunts took place thousands of kilometers away, linking regions in what I call "ecological teleconnections." The hunts dramatically reduced the populations of all three species, most drastically the bison. For ten thousand years, bison had helped to regulate their biome, the North American prairie grasslands, playing a role of a keystone species. East African elephants on their savanna grasslands, and sperm whales in oceans, had functioned for even longer as keystone species. The sharp and sudden reductions in populations of these animals after 1800 produced a variety of indirect ecological effects, reshuffling the ecosystems in question, making for difficult times for human communities that had come to depend on them.

Matthew Gandy is a geographer at University College London whose work focuses on cities, how they work, and how their workings are represented in art and literature. His first book, entitled Concrete and Clay (2002), about New York, won a prize. Since its appearance, he has published dozens of articles and several edited books, and his output has earned him election to the British Academy. This latest book concerns six big cities at various points in their recent history: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London.

An important aspect of conflict prevention, avoidance, and resolution in the international security area is illustrated by several military-to-military arrangements originally worked out between the United States and the Soviet Union (and now in force with Russia) to deal with disputes of an operational nature—those which, if not resolved, might lead to actual conflict.

Historians are curious creatures. We believe nowadays in the uniqueness of events, so much so that notions of regularity, pattern, and system have become inherently suspect. Sometimes efforts to see these in the human past are deemed evidence of some nefarious political inclination toward domination or imperialism. Thus we ordinarily leave the very big picture to others, such as journalists, sociologists, or even biologists such as Jared Diamond [6]. Their work offers a challenge from which historians usually shrink, although that charge cannot be leveled at David Christian [3] who has recently sought to find regular patterns not only in human history, but throughout the history of the Universe. In this chapter I offer two different attempts to identify big patterns, regularity, and system in human history. The first concerns a proposed pattern in the evolution of differentiation and integration in human culture, or, as I put it, using terms for the conditions rather than the processes, heterogeneity and homogeneity. The second considers analogies between animal species and human societies.