Showing results for "Rules for the World" in World

A look at how one man’s eccentricity influenced an iconic hero.

The laws now enforced throughout the world are almost all modelled on systems developed in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. During 200 years of colonial rule, Europeans exported their laws everywhere they could. But they weren't filling a void: in many places, they displaced traditions that were already ancient when Vasco Da Gama first arrived in India. Even the Romans were inspired by earlier precedents.

Simply put, an algorithm is a set of instructions-it's the code that makes computers run. A basic idea that proved elusive for hundreds of years and bent the minds of the greatest thinkers in the world, the algorithm is what made the modern world possible. Without the algorithm, there would have been no computer, no Internet, no virtual reality, no e-mail, or any other technological advance that we rely on every day.

In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features common to all empires, their evolutions and self-justifying myths, and the reasons for their inevitable decline.

"Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation" is the title of a list known as a school writing exercise of George Washington, who became the first president of the United States. Most of the rules have been traced to a French etiquette manual written in 1595, titled "Bienséance de la conversation entre les hommes". As a handwriting exercise circa 1745, Washington copied Francis Hawkins' translation which was published in England around 1640.