Showing results for "Culture and Civilization" in Politics & Social Sciences

The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires.

The Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappan Civilization, flourished between 2600 and 1900 BCE in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. It was one of the three great early civilizations of the Old World, alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia, yet it remains the most enigmatic. In this series, hosts Lucas and Luna explore the sophisticated urban planning of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, with its grid layouts, advanced drainage systems, and standardized brick sizes. They delve into the mysterious Indus script, still undeciphered, and the iconic unicorn seals that hint at trade networks ...

As the "science of humanity," anthropology can help us understand virtually anything about ourselves, from our political and economic systems, to why we get married, to how we decide to buy a particular bottle of wine. This 24-lecture course reveals the extraordinary power of anthropology - and its subspecialty, cultural anthropology - as a tool to understand the world's varied human societies, including our own.

In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What...

Brought to you by Penguin. How a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of...

In this extraordinary book, an award-winning author tells the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age “Terrific… Tamim Ansary explores the underappreciated ways that empires, nations, and smaller sets of people have responded to their surroundings...

In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid...

Award-winning ancient historian, archaeologist, and social media sensation Dr. Jess Venner re-creates Pompeii’s final day before Mount Vesuvius’s eruption, revealing not just how its people died but how they lived. While today the ruins of Pompeii stand silent and preserved in ash and stone...

From the Indus Valley Civilization to the world’s largest democracy, the Indian subcontinent has been a crucible of human achievement, conflict, and transformation. Join Lucas and Luna as they chart the full arc of India's history: the rise of the Harappan cities, the Vedic age, and the Mauryan Empire under Chandragupta and Ashoka, whose embrace of Buddhism reshaped Asia. They explore the Gupta Golden Age, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughal Empire — from Babur's victory at Panipat to Shah Jahan's Taj Mahal and the decline under Aurangzeb. The show investigates the British East India ...

How do historians create their histories? What role do the historian's viewpoint and method play in what we accept as truth? Answer these questions and more as you go inside the minds of our greatest historians and explore the idea of written history as it has shaped humanity's story over 2,000 years

An eye-opening investigation into ancestry and origins in the Middle East that synthesizes thousands of years of genetic history in the region to question what it means to be indigenous to any land “Ancestors transcends geography to launch an eye-opening inquiry into the relationship of...

Thomas C. Foster, acclaimed author of the phenomenal bestseller How to Read Literature Like a Professor, returns with a hugely entertaining appreciation of twenty-five works of literature that have greatly influenced the American identity. In a delightfully informative, often wry manner...

Bloomsbury presents Whatever Happened to Tradition? written and read by Tim Stanley. The West feels lost. Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus: we hurtle from one crisis to another, lacking definition, terrified that our best days are behind us. The central argument of this book is that we can only...

"A moral dilemma gripped Anil K. Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural on-farm research sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this...

The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums BC. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them.

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. Anthropocene antihumanism has been inspired by revulsion at...

In Status Civilization, Will Barrent awakens with no memories, only to find himself on Omega—a ruthless planet designated for criminals, where the average lifespan barely exceeds three years. Branded as a murderer, he is thrust into the depths of an illicit society as a mere “peon,” the lowest of the low. A mysterious girl hands him a weapon, igniting his journey towards power—a journey fraught with brutal choices. Yet, this path is essential for uncovering the truth behind his imprisonment, a truth that challenges his very identity and forces him to confront the ...

The Civilization Archive is part of The Archive Network by Jonkai Ventures, a collection of podcasts dedicated to the stories that shaped our world. This series explores the civilizations and empires of history: how they rose, what they built, how they lived, and why they fell.From the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate to the great cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, each series tells one civilization's story across five episodes as a documentary-style narrative: its origins, its golden age, its achievements, and its decline or legacy.Support the podcast and access ...

The Maya civilization thrived for over three millennia across the Yucatán Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, building dazzling city-states like Tikal, Calakmul, and Palenque. Their achievements in mathematics, hieroglyphic writing, and astronomy rivaled any in the ancient world—they tracked Venus with precision, invented the concept of zero independently, and created the famous Long Count calendar that sparked apocalyptic predictions in the modern era. Yet by the ninth century CE, the Classic Maya heartland experienced a profound collapse: cities were abandoned, dynastic records ...

From the first city-states of Mesopotamia to the digital borders of the 21st century, this show tracks humanity's ceaseless re-drawing of lines on the map. Lucas and Luna guide listeners through the rise and fall of empires—the Achaemenid satrapies, the Roman limes, the Mauryan edicts carved on pillars, the Treaty of Westphalia, the Berlin Conference of 1884, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the partition of India, the fall of the Iron Curtain. Why did the Qin dynasty standardize borders and writing? How did the Mongol Empire's Pax Mongolica rewire trade routes from Korea to Hungary? What made the...