Quotes About History

The explosive properties of gunpowder were first used in war by the Jin, the northern rivals of the Song, in 1221.

If modernity is, as I will argue, a global phenomenon, a Eurocentric approach is bound to mislead us. More recently, historians interested in world history have tried to see modernity as a global problem that requires a global explanation.

There were African slaves in China from at least the seventh century CE, and, Wolf reports, "by 1119 most of the wealthy people of Canton were said to have possessed Black slaves.

Innovation ensured that each cycle normally reached a higher level than its predecessor, but innovation was normally too slow to prevent an eventual collapse within each cycle, as populations outstripped available resources.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

The modern era is the briefest but most turbulent of the three main eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and the agrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern era has lasted just 250 years. Yet during this brief era change has been more rapid and more fundamental than ever before; indeed, populations have grown so fast that 20 percent of all humans may have lived during just these two and a half centuries.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press.

Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)

Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. London: Vintage. Diamond, J. (2004). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking

From the beginning most of history was a story of divergence: humans' biological and cultural differentiation as they evolved and dispersed across the planet. For the past millennium, history has been dominated by convergent forces, of which globalization is the latest phase. During this era that I call the Great Convergence, human interaction, trade, and intercommunication have increased at a rapid rate.

Even in Jericho, the oldest-known farming village, the walls, which were once believed to have been fortifications, are now thought to have been an early form of flood control.

most of human history (chronologically speaking) has taken place in communities quite innocent of state power.

We cannot really change the past, Gart," Larka whispered kindly, "but perhaps we can change the way we see it. You must escape your history, as Morgra could not escape hers. That is the only way to truly conquer her. Otherwise it will go on forever. We can make a different future. If we have true courage.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.

Brown inherited a growing economy, low inflation and rising tax revenues. If he had just done nothing, or stayed in bed, or taken up Scottish country dancing full time, or gone on holiday for the rest of his life and not meddled with the economy, he would have gone down in history as one of Britain's greatest ever chancellors.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the life of a secondary schoolmaster was as miserable as it has ever been,

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.

Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom.

When the Bible is viewed primarily as a collection of devotional thoughts, its status as the most devastating work of social criticism in history is forgotten.

history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.