Showing results for "dagomar degroot"

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Dagomar Degroot

A Scientific American, Nautilus, and New Scientist Best Book of the YearThe untold story of how environmental change throughout the cosmos shaped five hundred years of human civilization.Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our fragile bl...

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Dagomar Degroot

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Studies in Environment and History

Dagomar Degroot offers the first detailed analysis of how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that reached its chilliest point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighboring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. By tracing the occasionally cou...

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Dagomar Degroot

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Dagomar Degroot

Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our fragile blue planet: Earth.In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking human endeavor to the rest of the solar system. He reveals how variability in planetary environments has shaped geopolitics, spurred scientific ...

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Mike Dash

From the bestselling author of Tulipomania comes Batavia’s Graveyard, the spellbinding true story of mutiny, shipwreck, murder, and survival.It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s flagship, was loaded with a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the Company’s fleet, a tangible symbol of the world’s richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set...

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Paul Chiasson

The Island of Seven Cities unveils the first tangible proof that the Chinese settled in the New World before Columbus.In the summer of 2003, architect Paul Chiasson decided to climb a mountain he had never explored on Cape Breton Island, where eight generations of his Acadian family had lived. One of the oldest points of exploration and settlement in the Americas, with a written history dating back to the first days of European discovery, Cape Breton is li...

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Jerry Brotton

A New York Times Bestseller“Maps allow the armchair traveler to roam the world, the diplomat to argue his points, the ruler to administer his country, the warrior to plan his campaigns and the propagandist to boost his cause… rich and beautiful.” – Wall Street JournalThroughout history, maps have been fundamental in shaping our view of the world, and our place in it. But far from being purely scientific objects, maps of th...

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James Belich

A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern ageIn 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic histor...

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Clifford D Conner

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and i...

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Paul Chiasson

2017 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award — ShortlistedPaul Chiasson reveals the possibility that early Chinese settlers landed in Cape Breton long before Europeans.From the very beginning of the European Age of Discovery, Cape Breton was considered unusual. The history of the area even includes early references to the island having once been the land of the Chinese. In 1497, at least a century before any attempt at European settlement in the regio...

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John R. Gillis

Since before recorded history, people have congregated near water. But as growing populations around the globe continue to flow toward the coasts on an unprecedented scale and climate change raises water levels, our relationship to the sea has begun to take on new and potentially catastrophic dimensions. The latest generation of coastal dwellers lives largely in ignorance of the history of those who came before them, the natural environment, and the need to live sustainably on the world's ...

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Prof Bas van Bavel

The Low Countries -- an area roughly embracing the present-day Netherlands and Belgium -- formed a patchwork of varied economic and social development in the Middle Ages, with some regions displaying a remarkable dynamism. Manors and Markets charts the history of these vibrant economies and societies, and contrasts them with alternative paths of development, from the early medieval period to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Providing a concise overview of social and econo...

This ambitious and innovative book sets out to establish a new understanding of human aggression and conflict in the distant past. Examining the evidence of warfare in prehistoric times and in the early historical period, John Carman and Anthony Harding throw fresh light on the motives and methods of the combatants. This study marks a significant new step in this fascinating and neglected subject, and sets the agenda for many years to come. By integrating archaeological an...