Quotes About History

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

1) The availability of cheap slave labor in classical times supposedly discouraged innovation then, whereas high wages or labor scarcity now stimulate the search for technological solutions.

he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history's broadest pattern.

Until around A.D. 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe, even more so than medieval Islam. The long list of Chinese inventions includes canal lock gates, cast iron, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses, movable type, paper, porcelain, printing (except for the Phaistos disk), sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows. China then ceased to be innovative for reasons about which we shall speculate in the Epilogue.

history is not "just one damn fact after another," as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.

Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.

An example of a much more difficult invention is writing, which does not suggest itself by observation of any natural material. As we saw in Chapter 12, it had only a few independent origins, and the alphabet arose apparently only once in world history.

truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

Tasmanya'n?n Avrupal? kaÅŸiflerce MS 1642 y?l?nda ilk keÅŸfedildiÄŸi zamanki taÅŸ teknolojisi,Yukar? Avrupa'n?n on binlerce y?l önce Yontma TaÅŸ Ça??'ndaki teknolojisinden daha basitti.

La historia siguió trayectorias distintas para diferentes pueblos debido a las diferencias existentes en los entornos de los pueblos, no debido a diferencias biológicas entre los propios pueblos».

A typical American fast-food restaurant meal would include chicken (first domesticated in China) and potatoes (from the Andes) or corn (from Mexico), seasoned with black pepper (from India) and washed down with a cup of coffee (of Ethiopian origin).

In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools.

Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part

This will be a frequent dilemma for historians trying to apply the comparative method to problems of human history: apparently too many potentially independent variables, and far too few separate outcomes to establish those variables' importance statistically.

I do not mean to imply, however, that the role of disease in history was confined to paving the way for European expansion. Malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases of tropical Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea furnished the most important obstacle to European colonization of those tropical areas.

it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it. While nomads and tribespeople occasionally defeat organized governments and religions, the trend over the past 13,000 years has been for the nomads and tribespeople to lose.

Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

Those protohumans are generally known as Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence.

Why did history unfold differently on different continents?

Michael Shermer in the paper "Exorcising Laplace's demon: Chaos and antichaos, history and metahistory," History and Theory 34:59–83 (1995). Shermer's

Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.

AUTHORS ARE REGULARLY asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.