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Homo sapiens have remained the same species, largely unchanged in genetic makeup and anatomy since the Cro-Magnon era. By contrast, the cultural, social, and technological changes since then have been nothing less than extraordinary. At the core of this development is the ability of humans to store and transmit knowledge, so that each new generation stands upon the shoulders of its predecessors. This ability to use what has gone before is what sets humans apart.

Telling our story, from prehistory to the present day, DK’s History is a thought-provoking journey, revealing the common threads and forces that have shaped human history. Taking a broad-themed approach, acknowledging varied factors at work, from climate, ecology, disease, and geology and their roles in the human story, this visual celebration makes history accessible and relevant, putting events in their wider context and showing how they have shaped the world we live in.

Product Description

This is the definitive, 4.4 million year-old story of human history – from the origins of mankind to the 21st century, spanning the globe and based on the latest research, the complete story of the people, events, themes, ideas and forces that have shaped human existence. Find out about our history’s turning points: eye witness accounts and biographies give a personal angle to major events. Explore humankind’s legacy from architecture and artefacts to the big ideas that have changed our world. Examine the effect we’ve had on nature and vice versa. And discover how the past has been unlocked: from interpreting ancient documents to analysing ice cores. This book is a compelling look at human existence: perfect for the family bookshelf. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

Product Details

• Hardcover: 612 pages
• Publisher: DK ADULT (October 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 075663119X
• ISBN-13: 978-0756631192
• Product Dimensions: 12.4 x 10.3 x 1.6 inches

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Book Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1 edition (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805082360
• ISBN-13: 978-0805082364
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches

Book Description:

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.

Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford’s early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia’s eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.

More than a parable of one man’s arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford’s great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.

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