Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Peter Haugen</b> is a prolific history writer. In addition to authoring and contributing to several books, his work has appeared in publications including <i>History Magazine</i>, <i>mental_floss</i>, and <i>Psychology Today</i>. Haugen has served on the staffs of such newspapers as the <i>St. Petersburg Times</i> and the Sacramento Bee.

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Now updated! Your personal tour guide to the history of the world

Want to know more about global history? This concise guide explains in clear detail all the major players and events that have made the world what it is today. Covering the entirety of human history, this comprehensive resource highlights important developments in everything from religion and science to art and war — giving you an understanding of how the 21st-century world came to be.

• Begin to connect with the past — label the eras as you meet the Neanderthals, home in on Homer, raise Atlantis, and preserve Pharaohs

• Find strength in numbers — trace the growth from ancient civilizations to today's global community and discover what makes societies succeed or fail

• Discover the impact of thought — explore the rise of religion, the roots of philosophy, and the advance of science — and how our feelings and beliefs continually redefined us

• Know the global consequences of war — ride with the Greeks and the Romans, arm yourself with the cavalry, dig the trenches, and follow the paths humans took to wage modern war

• Meet the movers and shakers — from great leaders and courageous revolutionaries to ruthless tyrants and unsung heroes

• Examine significant events of the 21st century — from 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to climate change, Hurricane Katrina, and the economic rise of China, India, and Brazil

Open the book and find:

• A detailed overview of history

• The development of the world's religions

• Reviews of essential historical documents, from the Bible to the Bill of Rights

• The invention of writing and art

• Scientific developments that revolutionized the world

• Capsule biographies of people who changed history — and a few who were changed by it

• Ten unforgettable dates in world history

Aus dem Klappentext

Now updated! Your personal tour guide to the history of the world

Want to know more about global history? This concise guide explains in clear detail all the major players and events that have made the world what it is today. Covering the entirety of human history, this comprehensive resource highlights important developments in everything from religion and science to art and war — giving you an understanding of how the 21st-century world came to be.

• Begin to connect with the past — label the eras as you meet the Neanderthals, home in on Homer, raise Atlantis, and preserve Pharaohs

• Find strength in numbers — trace the growth from ancient civilizations to today's global community and discover what makes societies succeed or fail

• Discover the impact of thought — explore the rise of religion, the roots of philosophy, and the advance of science — and how our feelings and beliefs continually redefined us

• Know the global consequences of war — ride with the Greeks and the Romans, arm yourself with the cavalry, dig the trenches, and follow the paths humans took to wage modern war

• Meet the movers and shakers — from great leaders and courageous revolutionaries to ruthless tyrants and unsung heroes

• Examine significant events of the 21st century — from 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to climate change, Hurricane Katrina, and the economic rise of China, India, and Brazil

Open the book and find:

• A detailed overview of history

• The development of the world's religions

• Reviews of essential historical documents, from the Bible to the Bill of Rights

• The invention of writing and art

• Scientific developments that revolutionized the world

• Capsule biographies of people who changed history — and a few who were changed by it

• Ten unforgettable dates in world history

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World History For Dummies

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

In This Chapter

* Pondering how the past shaped the present

* Thinking about humankind's remarkable journey

* Following an intricate tapestry of historical threads

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a lot of news stories on American TV and in print addressed the question: "How did we get here?" For several years, those stories were about U.S. wars abroad, especially a war in Iraq that went on much longer than the U.S. officials who started the conflict had foreseen.

"What series of events led the United States to this predicament?" asked the journalists. "How did decisions made by American leaders take us down this path?" pondered the pundits. "Why the heck didn't anybody see this coming?" screamed bloggers.

Then, in 2008, the American economy unraveled. Huge financial institutions teetered on the edge of failure. Congress and the White House threw these firms a rope by pledging many hundreds of billions of dollars in public money to save private businesses - banks and investment companies so big that, to let them die, the taxpayers were told, would mean absolute disaster for the nation and the world.

"What was the series of events?" asked the journalists. "How did leaders' decisions take us down this path?" puffed the pundits. "How could we be so stupid!" thundered the bloggers.

This book isn't about a twenty-first century war in Iraq any more than it's about first-century BC wars in Greece. It isn't about modern economics, either. (That's a subject I know way too little about.) It's about the broader questions of "How did things get to be like this?" and "Why is the world as it is?"

I can't answer those questions in detail because there have been too many years of human activity on this planet, too many lives lived, too many migrations, wars, murders, weddings, coronations, inventions, revolutions, recessions, natural disasters, and financial meltdowns. Too many historians have interpreted events in too many contradictory ways. But what I hope you find in this book is a general view of how human history has gotten you and the world you live in to current reality. To now.

Firing Up the WABAC Machine

If you're old enough to remember or are a fanatic about classic TV cartoons, you may have heard of the WABAC machine. Pronounced "way back," it was a fictional time-traveling device built and operated by a genius dog named Mr. Peabody. In every episode of a 1960s animated show called Rocky and His Friends (later repackaged under other titles including The Bullwinkle Show), the professorial pooch and his pet boy, Sherman, would transport themselves to some historical setting - say, ancient Rome, revolutionary America, or medieval England - where they would interact with famous people from history and usually solve whatever ridiculously absurd dilemma was troubling Julius Caesar, George Washington, or King Arthur. Thus, Mr. Peabody and Sherman allowed the events we all know as history to take their proper course.

Filled with outrageous puns and deadpan humor (if a cartoon can be deadpan), these episodes were a goofy variation on a classic science fiction premise. Imaginative storytellers have often used time travel as a plot device. American novelist Mark Twain did it in 1889 with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. England's H.G. Wells followed suit in 1895 with The Time Machine. More recent examples include the Terminator films, British TV's various incarnations of Doctor Who, and innumerable episodes from the Star Trek television and feature film franchise.

Often these stories involve someone or something going back in time in order to change something in the present or to prevent the present from being changed in some disastrous fashion. One tiny interference in the "time continuum," as it's often called, can lead to a monumentally altered chain of events.

Of course nobody can really do that. Not now. Maybe not ever. It's a realm of possibility - or impossibility - that modern science has hardly begun to address, except in theoretical terms.

REMEMBER

You can, however, understand a heck of a lot more about the present if you time travel in your head - that is, think about the ways that yesterday's events shaped today. Ponder how what happened a decade ago shapes this year and how a single change somewhere in the past could have shaped a different present. Historians scoff at the "what if" game, but there may be no better tool for getting your head into history.

What if John McCain had won the 2008 U.S. presidential election instead of Barack Obama? Would anything be different? How about Al Gore over George W. Bush back in 2000? That election's results were so close, and the outcome so hotly contested, that it could easily have turned out the other way.

What if the terrorists who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, had been stopped before they could board those planes? Think about the lives saved, the grief avoided. Imagine the years since. What would have been different? U.S. troops wouldn't have been sent to Afghanistan, for one thing. Would you have ever heard of Osama Bin Laden? Would there have been that next U.S. war in the Middle East, the one in Iraq? Would you still be exactly where you are, doing the same thing you're doing now? For many people worldwide, the answer to all those questions is "no."

From Footpath to Freeway: Humanity Built on Humble Beginnings

The earliest human beings were hunter-gatherers. There may be a slim chance that you're still living that way - spending all your time and energy intent on getting food from the natural world around you. But I very much doubt it. Instead you're a student, an office worker, a homemaker, a cable TV installer, or you perform any of thousands of occupations unimagined by early humankind. You use tools like cellphones and laptop computers - things hardly dreamed of when I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, let alone back at the dawn of civilization. Yet here I am, clacking away on a computer keyboard, checking my meager investments online, and listening to my iPod, just like a modern human being. And in a way, here too are the people of 30,000 years ago, my ancestors and yours.

They may have thought a lot about root plants, berries, seeds, probably insects and grubs, shellfish in season, meat when it was available, and calorie-rich bone marrow from fresh or scavenged kills. They literally had to scrounge to get what they needed to stay alive. In the warm climates where early members of the species lived, survival may not have been terribly difficult. They were endowed with the same basic mental equipment we have today. They were big-brained, tool-using animals, and after many tens of thousands of years living hand-to-mouth off of what they could find or kill, some of them decided there had to be a better way.

Either pushed by circumstance (climate change, for example) or somehow inspired by the thought of new possibilities, they traveled from the lush forests, savannahs, and seacoasts of Africa to face the harsh challenges of virtually every environment on Earth - mountains, deserts, frozen steppes, and remote islands. Eventually, they traded in their stone spearheads and scrapers for tools and weapons made of copper, then bronze, then iron . . ....