Ten millennia in the Mono Lake Basin, showing how this complex ecosystem came to be what it is today.Nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California sits a stunning landscape overlooking a saline lake with picturesque tufa towers and flocks of phalarope birds. This is the Mono Lake Basin.In this sweeping history, Robert B. Marks examines the forces that have shaped the Mono Lake Basin's rich ecosystem. The story starts with the region's Indig...

This deeply informed and clearly written text provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Now updated to include recent political events and scientific research, the book focuses on the interaction of humans and their environment. Tracing changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a fifth of humankind, Robert B. Marks illuminates the paradoxes inherent in China’s environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustain...

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment. Robert ...

At the dawn of the 21st Century, the video game industry experienced a period of wild creativity, fighting for recognition as an art form while making the transformation into a media juggernaut. And as it did, Garwulf's Corner was there, watching and commentating.One of the earliest, if not the first, video game issues columns on the Internet, Garwulf's Corner ran every two weeks from 2000 to 2002 on Diabloii.net. Written by Robert B. Marks, author of Diablo: Demonsbane and The Eve...

It is the Road of Legends, the Great Road, the road between worlds. Veiled in mist, it is a pathway where anything is possible, where heroes battle with dragons, and where immortals wander in their endless lives. It is where a traveller can journey into the very stories, myths, and legends themselves.And, deep in the mists of the Great Road, a madman will stop at nothing to destroy every single one of them.Robert B. Marks, the author of Diablo: Demonsbane, invites you to ta...

This collection of essays asserts the specific value of world history research and teaching, showing how the field contributes to the larger historical profession and offering concrete suggestions to develop more interaction between the academy and the public. The twelve contributors, each with their own academic areas of interest, are experienced scholars and classroom teachers. Uniting them together in this volume is their professional relationship with Jerry H. Bentley (1949–2012). This...

This exciting new reader in environmental history provides a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world-systems over time. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier have brought together a group of the prominent social scientists, historians, and geographical scientists to provide a historical overview of the ecological dimension of global economic processes. Readers are challenged to integrate studies of the Earth-system with studies of the world-sys...

This volume illuminates the relationship of China's radical past to its reformist present as China makes a way forward through very differently conceived and contested visions of the future. In the context of early twenty-first century problems and the failures of global capitalism, is China's history of revolutionary socialism an aberration that is soon to be forgotten, or can it serve as a resource for creating a more fully human and radically democratic China with implications for all o...

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment. Robert ...

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remai...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and “one of the modern masters of fantasy writing,” (Huffington Post) a dazzling, witty telling of the Norse myths."A lively, funny, and very human rendition of Thor the thunder god, his father Odin, and the dark-hearted trickster Loki (plus countless other gods and monsters)." — Petra Mayer, NPRNeil Gaiman, long inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms ...

When a Billion Chinese Jump tells the story of China's - and the world's - biggest crisis. With foul air, filthy water, rising temperatures and encroaching deserts, China is already suffering an environmental disaster. Now it faces a stark choice: either accept catastrophe, or make radical changes.Traveling the vast country to witness this environmental challenge, Jonathan Watts moves from mountain paradises to industrial wastelands, examining the responses of thos...