World History For Dummies E-Book

Peter Haugen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 678

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

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the book and find: * A detailed overview of history * The development of the world's religions * Reviews of essential historical documents, from the Bible to the Bill of Rights * The invention of writing and art * Scientific developments that revolutionized the world * Capsule biographies of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

Leseprobe

World History For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

What do I mean by “history”?

Positively post-historic

Making sense of AD, BC, CE, and BCE

Pardon my French, I mean Latin

Perceiving and avoiding biases

What You’re Not to Read

Foolish Assumptions

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Getting into History

Part II: Finding Strength in Numbers

Part III: Seeking Answers

Part IV: Fighting, Fighting, Fighting

Part V: Meeting the Movers and Shakers

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in this Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Getting into History

Chapter 1: Tracing a Path to the Present

Firing Up the WABAC Machine

From Footpath to Freeway: Humanity Built on Humble Beginnings

War! What Is It Good For? Material for History Books, That’s What

Appreciating History’s Tapestry

Threading backward

Crossing threads

Weaving home

Making the Connections

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 2: Digging Up Reality

Homing In on Homer

The Troy story

Inspired archaeological finds

Raising Atlantis

Reading the Body Language of the Dead

Frozen in the Alps

Salted away in Asia

Bogged down in northern Europe

Dried and well preserved in the Andes

Preserved pharaohs in Egypt

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 3: Putting History into Perspective

Being Human Beings

Nearing the Neanderthal

Talking point

Dividing Time into Eras . . . and Giving Them Names

Sorting ancient from modern

Classical schmassical

Bowing to the queens

The Noteworthy and the Notorious Are Often the Same

A study in contradictions

It depends on the way you look at them

Verifying virtue

Tracking the Centuries

Part II: Finding Strength in Numbers

Chapter 4: Getting Civilized

Building Jericho’s Walls for Mutual Defense

Planting Cities along Rivers

Settling between the Tigris and Euphrates

Getting agricultural in Africa

Assembling Egypt

Going up the river into Kush

Giving way as new civilizations rise

Heading east to the Indus and Yellow Rivers

Coming of Age in the Americas

Keeping Records on the Way to Writing and Reading

Planning pyramids

Laying down laws and love songs

Shaping the World Ever After

Building the Persian Empire

Growing toward Greekness

Making Alexander great

Rounding Out the World

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 5: The Rise and Fall of Many Empires

Rome’s Rise and Demise

Forming the Roman Republic

Earning citizenship

Expanding the empire

Crossing the Rubicon

Empowering the emperor

Roaming eastward

Western empire fades into history

Rome and the Roman Catholic Church

Building Empires around the World

Ruling Persia and Parthia

India’s empires

Uniting China: Seven into Qin

Flourishing civilizations in the Americas

Rounding Out the Rest of the World

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 6: History’s Mid-Life Crisis: The Middle Ages

Building (And Maintaining) the Byzantine Empire

Sharing and Imposing Culture

Bearing with barbarians

Traversing Africa with the Bantu

Sailing and settling with the Vikings

Traveling the Silk Road

Planting the Seeds of European Nations

Repelling the raiders

Uniting Western Europe: Charlemagne pulls it together

Keeping fledgling nations together

Emerging Islamic Fervor

Rebounding Guptas in India

Rounding Out the World

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 7: The Struggle for World Domination

Extending the Arab Empire and Spreading Islam

Taking education and literacy to new heights

Making advances in science and technology

Mastering the Indian Ocean

Assembling and disassembling an empire

Excelling in East Asia

Innovating the Chinese way

Traveling the Silk Road for trade and cultural exchange

Sailing away for a spell

Europe Develops a Taste for Eastern Goods

Orienting Venice

Ottomans control trade routes between Europe and the East

Mounting the Crusades

Meeting the main players

Looking at the misguided zeal of specific Crusades

Setting a precedent for conquest

Growing Trade between East and West

Surviving the Black Death

Killing relentlessly

Doing the math: Fewer folks, more wealth

Seeking a Way East and Finding Things to the West

Meeting the Americans who met Columbus

Some celebrate discovery, others rue it

Training and experience shaped Columbus

Stumbling upon the West Indies

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 8: Grabbing the Globe

Sailing South to Get East

Getting a foothold in Indian trade

Demanding respect

“Discovering” America

How the Aztecs rose and fell

Incas grasp greatness and then fall to the Spanish

Circling the Planet

Ottomans ascend among Eastern empires

Founding East India companies

Closing the door to Japan

Playing by British East India Company rules

China goes from Ming to Qing

Using force and opium to open Chinese ports

Spreading the Slave Trade

Perpetuating an evil

Developing a new market

Succeeding in the slave trade

Starting Revolutions

Bringing in the new

Playing with dangerous ideas

Rebelling Americans

Erupting France

Writing L’Ouverture to freedom

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 9: Clashing All Around the World

Managing Unprecedented Empires

Britain battles on multiple fronts

Reinventing post-revolutionary France

Dividing up Africa

Challenges Test European Dominance

Turning against Spanish rule in Latin America

Reclaiming Africa for Africans

Rising Asians

Japan unleashes pent-up power

Ricocheting unrest comes home to Europe

Revolting in Russia

Standing apart up north

Rushin’ toward rebellion

Taking power: The Soviet Union

Accelerating toward the Present: Transportation and Communication

Getting somewhere in a hurry

Sending word

Fighting World Wars

Redefining war: World War I

Returning to conflict: World War II

Hot and Cold Running Conflicts

Daring each other to blink in the Cold War

Seeing no end to violent conflicts

Let’s Get Together: The United Nations

Tracking the Centuries

Part III: Seeking Answers

Chapter 10: Religion through the Ages

Defining Religion

Divining the role of god(s)

Projecting will on the physical world

Analyzing the religious impulse

Distinguishing philosophy from religion

Judaism

Awaiting a Messiah

Maintaining Jewish nationalism

Hinduism

Buddhism

Christianity

The Roman Catholic Church

The Eastern Orthodox Church

The Protestant churches

Islam

The Five Pillars

Going beyond Mecca and Medina

Clashing cultures

Sikhism

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 11: Loving Wisdom: The Rise and Reach of Philosophy

Asking the Big Questions

Founding science in philosophy

Mixing philosophy and religion

Tracing Philosophy’s Roots

Living on the edges of Greek society

Drawing inspiration from other cultures

Traveling broadens the mind

Examining Eastern Philosophies

Leading to (and from) Socrates

Building a tradition of seeking answers

Thinking for himself: Socrates’ legacy

Building on Socrates: Plato and Aristotle

Tracing Plato’s influence

Philosophy in the Age of Alexander and After

Spreading Hellenistic philosophies

Putting philosophy to practical use

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 12: Being Christian, Thinking Greek

The Great Chain of Being

Interpreting Christian Theology

Stacking scripture upon scripture

Replacing Homer with the Bible

Establishing Jesus’s Divinity

Augustine’s Influence on Early Christian Thought

Divining the mind of God

Condoning righteous killing

Tracing two paths to salvation

The Philosophy of Aquinas

Keeping scholarship alive

Coming back to Aristotle

Supporting faith with logic

Embracing Humanism and More

Nothing secular about it

Tracing humanism’s impact

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 13: Awakening to the Renaissance

Realizing the Reach of the Renaissance

Redefining the Human Role

Florence in flower

Spreading the word

Promoting human potential

Reclaiming the ancients

Presenting the printing press

Uniting Flesh and Soul

Inspiring Michelangelo

Living in the material world

Returning to Science

Shifting the center of the universe

Studying human anatomy

Being All That You Could Be

Striving for perfection

Stocking up on self-help books

Writing for the Masses

Creating new classics

Staging dramas with Classical roots

Packing something to read onboard a ship

Fighting for Power in Europe

Battling for control of Italian city-states

Spilling outside of Italy’s borders

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 14: Making a Break: The Reformation

Cracks in the Catholic Monopoly

Losing authority

Satirizing the Church

Luther Challenges the System

Selling salvation

Peddling to pay the pope

Insisting on faith

A Precarious Holy Roman Empire

Searching for sources of cash

Fighting crime and inflation

Setting the stage for dissent

Standing Up to the Emperor

Luther Gains a Following

Losing control of the Lutheran movement

Choosing sides

The Empire Strikes Back

Savoring a bitter victory

Achieving compromise

Spreading Reform to England

Creating the Church of England

Realizing Henry’s legacy

Along Comes Calvin

Reforming the Swiss church

Establishing Puritanism

Causing turmoil in France

Sparking rebellion in Holland

Weakening the Holy Roman Empire

Puritanism in England and Scotland

Emigrating to America

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 15: Opening Up to Science and Enlightenment

Mingling Science and Philosophy

Starting a Scientific Revolution

Gazing at the heavens: Astronomy

Advancing scientific method

Waking Up to the Enlightenment

Experiencing empiricism

Living a “nasty, brutish, short” life

Reasoning to rationalism

Expanding to the Encyclopedists

Engineering the Industrial Revolution

Dealing with the social fallout

Raging against the machines: Luddite uprising

Marketing Economics

Playing the money game with Adam Smith

Developing capitalism and Marxism

Tracking the Centuries

Part IV: Fighting, Fighting, Fighting

Chapter 16: Sticks and Stones: Waging War the Old-Fashioned Way

Fighting as an Ancient Way of Life

Raising Armies

Keeping out attackers

Escalating weapons technology: Using metal

Riding into battle: Hooves and wheels

Awesome Assyrian Arsenals

Assembling the units

Wreaking havoc

Farming and Fighting Together in Greece

Soldiering shoulder to shoulder

Standing up to the Persians

Facing Macedonian ferocity

Making War the Roman Way

Marching in three ranks

Recruiting a standing force

Diversifying the legion

Returning to riders

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 17: The War Machine Gets Some Upgrades

Reinventing the Cavalry

Standing tall and staying astride with stirrups

Raiding as a way of life on horseback

Guarding Byzantine borders

Moors challenge

Chivalry

Putting on the Full Metal Jacket

Interlocking metal rings: Chain mail

Putting more power into the archer’s bow

Charging behind the lance

The longbow marries precision to power

Adding Firepower with Gunpowder

Lighting the fire of discovery

Spreading explosive news

Bringing in the big guns

Battering down Constantinople’s walls

Refining the new weaponry

Adapting old strategies for new weapons

Floating fortresses on the sea

Fortifications adapt to the artillery era

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 18: Modernized Mayhem

Following Three Paths to Modern War

Promoting devastation in Prussia

Putting technology to deadly uses: The Crimean War

Redefining armed conflict: The U.S. Civil War

Tying Tactics to Technology in the Twentieth Century

Trapping valor in a trench: World War I

Retooling the World War II arsenal

Warring On Despite the Nuclear Threat

Drawing strength from stealth: Guerilla tactics

Wielding the weapon of fear: Terrorism

Tracking the Centuries

Part V: Meeting the Movers and Shakers

Chapter 19: Starting Something Legendary

Spinning Legends

Uniting for Strength

Playing for Power

Building Bridges

Writing Laws

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 20: Battling Toward Immortality

Towering Over Their Times

Building Empires

Launching Attacks

Mounting a Defense

Devising Tactics

Instigating Inspiration

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 21: Explorers and Discoverers: Places to Go, People to See

Famous Pioneers: Arriving before Their Time

Notable Travelers: Carrying Messages

Trailblazing Explorers: Seeking New Routes

Notorious Conquerors: Bad Company

Famous Firsts

Renowned Guides

Famous Mavericks: Taking Advantage of Opportunity

Tracking the Centuries

Chapter 22: Turning Tables: Rebels and Revolutionaries

Revolutionaries Who Became Rulers

Charismatic Rebels

Two Idea Guys

Standing against Authority

Rule Changers

Living and Dying by the Sword

Fallen Rebels

Tracking the Centuries

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Chapter 23: Ten Unforgettable Dates in History

460 BC: Athens Goes Democratic

323 BC: Alexander the Great Dies

476 AD: The Roman Empire Falls

1066: Normans Conquer England

1095: The First Crusade Commences

1492: Columbus Sails the Ocean Blue

1776: Americans Break Away

1807: Britain Bans the Slave Trade

1893: Women Start Getting the Vote around the World

1945: The United States Drops the A-Bomb

Chapter 24: Ten Essential Historical Documents

The Rosetta Stone

Confucian Analects

The Bible

The Koran

The Magna Carta

The Travels of Marco Polo

The Declaration of Independence

The Bill of Rights

The Communist Manifesto

On the Origin of Species

World History For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

by Peter Haugen

World History For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

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Copyright © 2009 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

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About the Author

Peter Haugen is the author of Was Napoleon Poisoned? And Other Unsolved Mysteries of Royal History (Wiley). A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, he has been a frequent contributor to History magazine and is among the co-writers of The Armchair Reader Amazing Book of History, mental_floss Presents Condensed Knowledge, and mental_floss Presents Forbidden Knowledge. A veteran journalist and critic, he was a staff member at several U.S. newspapers, including The St. Petersburg Times and The Sacramento Bee, and has written about topics ranging from the fine arts to molecular genetics. Haugen was an adjunct instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and California State University-Fresno and is a proud veteran of the U.S. Army. He lives in Wisconsin.

Author’s Acknowledgments

Thanks to my editors at Wiley — Project Editor Tim Gallan, Acquisitions Editor Lindsay Lefevere, and Copy Editor Elizabeth Rea — all of whom helped make the process of writing this second edition remarkably painless. Thanks, too, to all my family, especially my wife, Deborah Blum, for her constant support. I’d like to thank historian David McDonald, again, for his invaluable help with the first edition of this book, and all the wonderful history writers whose works I have combed through, pored through, and compared one against the other while once again skimming over the surface of the wonderful body of scholarship that is world history.

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Introduction

The complete history of the world boiled down to 400-some pages and crammed between paperback covers? The idea is preposterous. It’s outrageous. I’d be crazy to attempt it. So here goes.

No, wait. This book doesn’t claim to be complete. It can’t. Hundreds of other volumes are devoted to a measly decade or two — the World War II era comes to mind. To plumb thousands of years in one little book would be impossible. To skim across the surface, however, is another matter. If, while reading the following chapters, you hit upon an era, a personality, or a civilization that you’d like to know more about, there’s no lack of places to find out more. You can turn to many far more complete accounts of the history of specific countries, such as the United States; continents, such as Europe; and events, such as the U.S. Civil War. You can find books about all these topics and more in this excellent For Dummies series. But if you want a simplified overview consisting of a collection of easy-to-read glimpses into major players and events that have made the world what it is today, then I’m your guide and World History For Dummies, 2nd Edition is your first-stop reference.

About This Book

The history of the world is like a soap opera that has been running ever since the invention of writing. The show is lurid, full of dirty tricks and murder, romances and sexual deceptions, adventures, and wars and revolutions. (And, yes, treaties and dates.) Or maybe a better analogy is that history is like hundreds of soap operas with thousands of crossover characters jumping out of one story and into another — too many for even the most devoted fan to keep straight. All the more reason for an easy-to-use overview.

The most important thing to remember when paging through this book is that history is fun — or should be. It’s not as if this is life-and-death stuff. . . . no, wait. It is life-and-death — on a ginormous scale. It’s just that so many of the lives and deaths happened long ago. And that’s good, because I can pry into private affairs without getting sued. History is full of vintage gossip and antique scandal, peppered heavily with high adventure (swords and spears and canons and stuff). The more you get into it, the better you’ll do when the neighbors drag out the home version of Jeopardy. Renaissance Italy for $500, please.

Conventions Used in This Book

Every field from brain surgery to refuse collection has a special vocabulary. History is no exception, but I tried to steer clear of historians-only words in this book. When such a word is unavoidable, I explain it in reader-friendly terms. As for other technical terms, I italicize them and then follow up with definitions and explanations. If you still think you may get lost amid the dates, facts, quotes, and other details, this section guides you through the conventions I use in order to help you better understand the book and access the information you want or need.

What do I mean by “history”?

This isn’t a stupid question. People apply the term history to fields other than, well, history. For example, scientists talk about geological history, and physicians talk about your medical history. There’s also archeological history, in which experts use physical evidence to piece together the story of humankind before anybody wrote anything down. Even though historians often disagree about the details, history must be true or at least reasonably close to what really happened. Historians use educated guesses, too. I get into some of that in this book, but for the most part, I stick to documented human events.

History is also a written account (or at least on film or video). It often starts as oral history, but until the tale is set down in some permanent form, it’s too easy for facts to get lost or changed. Things written down aren’t immune to exaggeration, but there’s something about the spoken word that invites outlandish embellishment. (Think about fishing stories or campaign speeches.) That’s how history gets mangled and myths get made (that and cable news shows).

Some of the first stories ever written down were passed on by word of mouth for centuries before they ever were etched in mud or stone or on papyrus. They got pretty wild over the years; for example, Homer, a blind Greek poet, passed down a tale of the Trojan War based on a real military campaign, but many of his details are obviously myth. That stuff about Achilles’ mom being a water nymph, for example, and the way she supposedly dipped him in the River Styx to make him invulnerable — forgive me if I don’t buy that as exactly the way things went down. (Now, if Homer had told us Achilles was an alien from the planet Krypton. . . .)

Positively post-historic

Because history needs to be set down in some kind of permanent record, it dates back only about as far as the written word, which some scholars say the Sumerians invented, at least in pictograph (or picture-writing) form, around 3500 BC. Among the best early record keepers were the Egyptians, who invented their own form of writing (called hieroglyphics) around 3000 BC. Before written history, it was prehistoric times.

Making sense of AD, BC, CE, and BCE

The years 1492, when Columbus sailed, and 1620, when the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, are AD, just like this year. AD stands for Anno Domini. That’s Latin for “Year of Our Lord,” referring to the Christian era, or the time since Jesus was born. Before that, I designate years as BC, or Before Christ. Historians now prefer CE, for “Common Era,” instead of AD; and BCE, for “Before the Common Era,” instead of BC. The new initials aren’t tied into just one religion. AD and BC, however, are what most people are used to. They’re widely understood and deeply ingrained, so I stick with them throughout this book.

The years BC are figured by counting backwards. That’s why the year that Alexander the Great died, 323 BC, is a smaller number than the year that he was born, 356 BC.

Yet Alexander didn’t think of himself as living in backward-counting years three centuries before Christ any more than Augustus Caesar of Rome wrote the date 1 AD on his checks. This system of dating years came about a lot later when scholars superimposed their calendar on earlier times. Given that Jesus actually may have been born a little earlier than 1 AD — perhaps in about 6 BC — the system isn’t even particularly accurate. As the twentiethcentury came to a close, some self-proclaimed prophets thought the world would come to an end when the calendar turned over to year 2000. Obviously, it didn’t happen then or in any of the years since. As for next year or the year after that, I make no guarantees.

In this book, you can safely assume that a four-digit year without two capital letters following it is AD. For example, William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066. For the years 1–999 AD, I use the AD; for example, Norsemen invaded Ireland and began building the city of Dublin around 831 AD. I also include the initials for all the BC years. For examples, Saul was anointed the first king of the Israelites in about 1050 BC, and the Roman general Marc Antony died in 30 BC.

The reason I say “around” and “about” when giving the dates of Dublin’s founding and King Saul’s coronation is that nobody knows the dates for sure.

Another thing that confuses some people when reading history is the way centuries are named and numbered. When you see a reference to the 1900s, it doesn’t mean the same thing as the nineteenth century. The 1900s are the twentieth century. The twentieth century was the one in which four-digit year numbers started with 19. The nineteenth century was the one in which years started with 18, and so on. Why isn’t this century, the one with the 20 starting every year, the twentieth? Because the first century began in the year 1. When the numbers got up to 100 (or technically, 101), it became the second century, and so on. Figuring the centuries BC works the same way (in reverse, of course): The twenty-first century BC is the one with years starting with 20, just like the twenty-first century AD.

Pardon my French, I mean Latin

For Dummies books are intended to make complex topics easier to understand, and a large part of achieving that goal is avoiding hard-to-understand, experts-only language, especially if it’s not in English. But like so many things in life, there are exceptions.

You’ll find a very small number of Latin and other foreign words and phrases sprinkled throughout this book. I have to include them because I tell you about cultures and countries where English was unknown. With Latin, in particular,it’s not just that this book’s subjects include the important, influential Roman Empire, where everybody spoke Latin. I also cover Europe in the Middle Ages, when Latin was the international language. Finally, I can’t write about world history without covering the enormous influence of the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that for many centuries clung to Latin as its official means of expression. But don’t worry. I promise not to use many such terms, and when I do, I’ll explain what they mean.

Perceiving and avoiding biases

Some intellectuals question the very concept of history. “Whose history are we talking about?” they ask. If the victors write history, why do we accept those big bullies’ tainted point of view as true? What about the victims? What about the indigenous peoples, such as American Indians and Australian Aborigines? What about the women? Doesn’t it stink that so much of history is so overwhelmingly about white men?

Yes, it does. And it’s true that history is slanted. It’s people writing about people, so prejudice is built-in. You have to factor in the biases of the time in which events happened, the biases of the time when they were written down, and the prejudices of the scholars who turn them over and over again decades and often centuries later. I can’t change the fact that so many conquerors, monarchs, politicians, soldiers, explorers and yes, historians, have been men. It’s just as true that conventionally taught world history still spends a fair amount of time on Europe — how it was shaped and how it shaped other parts of the world, including the Americas.

Are there other stories worth telling, other points of view, other truths? You bet. You find some of them in this book, lightly touched upon, just like everything else here. But to be honest, the tilt is toward a male-centered history of what has been called western civilization. Why? Because that view is built on well-documented, widely disseminated tales of how the world became what it is.

You may want to change the world, and that’s often a noble ambition. You may just want to change the history books. Either way, it helps to know what you’re up against.

Where I can, I nod toward the realities of the twenty-first century, as non-Western countries — notably China and India — have grown into major forces in both the global economy and global politics, and where developing nations such as resource-rich Brazil seem poised to play ever larger roles in shaping the world’s history.

What You’re Not to Read

Although this book focuses on what you need to know about world history, I also deal with topics that, though useful, are less essential, at least during your first read-through. This skippable material includes:

Text in sidebars. Sidebars are shaded boxes that pop up here and there in the chapters. They deal with interesting subjects related to the chapter, but they aren’t necessary reading in order for you to understand major topics.

Anything with a Technical Stuff icon. You may find this information interesting, but you won’t miss out on anything critical if you pass over it.

Foolish Assumptions

As I wrote this book, I made some assumptions about you. They may be foolish, but here they are:

You’ve studied at least some history in school. You may even know quite a lot about certain historical topics, but you’d like to find out more about how it all fits together.

You’ve seen movies or read novels set in various historical eras, and you suspect they’d be more enjoyable if you were better informed about the time periods and the historical peoples featured.

At least once in your life you’ve encountered an obnoxious history know-it-all, one of those people who spews random facts about ancient Rome or the French Revolution. In the event that it happens again, you want the satisfaction of telling Ms. Smartypants she’s wrong.

How This Book Is Organized

I haven’t laid out history in chronological order in World History For Dummies, 2nd Edition. Not quite. I try to tell stories in the order that they happened, but as I explain in Chapter 1, many different threads run through history, and they crisscross and influence each other. But if you sort out the some of the many approaches you can take to history and some of the many topics within it, the threads are easier to understand and follow. With this in mind, I’ve divided the book as follows:

Each part is based on a broad topic such as civilizations throughout history, warfare throughout history, or the impact of religions and philosophies upon history.

Each chapter looks at a particular aspect or time period within the broad subject of the part.

Headings and subheadings isolate specific points within each chapter so that you can more easily get in and out of chapters and access just the information you need or want.

What follows is a breakdown of each part.

Part I: Getting into History

This part includes perspective to help you connect with the past. Your ancestors of decades, centuries, and millennia past were essentially the same as you. True, they dressed differently and didn’t have iPhones and cars and such. They may not have showered as often as you do, either, but they can still reveal things about you and how your world came to be as it is.

Part II: Finding Strength in Numbers

How did human society get to be a worldwide, interconnected network of cultures? What makes a civilization, and how does one succeed or fail? How does a civilization influence those that follow? This part of the book traces the growth from the earliest civilizations to today’s global community.

Part III: Seeking Answers

People act upon what they think and what they believe. In this part you can glimpse the ways that thoughts, ideas, and feelings — and the way people express and explore them in religion and philosophy — have always been a fundamental part of history.

Part IV: Fighting, Fighting, Fighting

History isn’t all conflict between nations — or between governments and the governed — but violent clashes and upheavals have immediate, often widespread, and sometimes long-lasting global consequences. This part examines historical battles of all scales as well as developments in warfare throughout the centuries of human conflict.

Part V: Meeting the Movers and Shakers

This part includes an extremely incomplete collection of capsule biographies of people who changed history, along with a few who were changed by it.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

In the grand tradition of For Dummies books, this part contains easy-to-digest lists of history’s unforgettable dates, indelible documents, and indispensible discoveries.

Icons Used in this Book

The margins of this book contain picture road signs that clue you into what’s going on in that particular portion of text. Some warn you of what you can skip, while others may help you find just what you’re interested in. I use the following icons:

This icon clues you in to an event, decision, or discovery that changed the world — whether at the time it happened or at a later date.

Screenwriters, perpetually hungry for plots, are always mining history for story ideas. This icon alerts you to film (and some TV) versions of real stories. Movies rarely get the facts right, but they can get you thinking about history.

This icon marks memorable sayings that you may have heard before but didn’t know who said them or in what context. When you know the stories behind these famous words, you’re qualified to toss them out over coffee or cocktails.

This icon marks major historical concepts to keep in mind as you read. They’re also points that you may want or need to refer back to as you work your way through the book.

This icon clues you in to more technical information — usually when, where, and/or how things were made and how things got done. For example, this icon marks paragraphs that tell you what society invented paper and who came up with a more accurate compass.

Where to Go from Here

A great thing about this book is that you can start with Chapter 1 and read to the end, but that’s not required. The parts are organized so that you can jump in any place you want. As you page through and browse, note that you can look at the same era from different perspectives. Part III, for example, tells you how philosophy and religion shaped history, and there you can find the religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation. But if you’re more interested in the weaponry and strategies of war, jump to Part IV. And if you just want to browse through some historical all-stars, check out Part V. Not sure what you’re looking for? Part I is a good place to get a general feel for history. The table of contents and index, along with the part summaries in the earlier section “How This Book Is Organized,” should get you to the page you need.

Part I

Getting into History

In this part . . .

Browsing through history can be like looking at the stars. Even if you don’t know a planet from a supernova or the name of a single constellation, the first thing you’re likely to get from gazing at the night sky is a sense of how small you are. That’s a good place to begin in astronomy, and it’s not a bad place to find yourself when peering into world history.

It’s easy to think of 100 years as a long time and 1,000 years as a long, long time. The modern habit is to chop up history and social trends into little decade-sized chunks — the 1980s, the 1990s, and so on. But if you step back a bit and consider how long human beings have been doing a lot of the same things people do today — buying, selling, cooking, falling in love, traveling, and fighting wars — you can gain a broader perspective. That’s both humbling and enriching.

Whether you define now as a day, a year, or a decade, it’s both a minuscule sliver of history and part of the larger thing. One of the best parts of being human is that you have more than your own experience to rely on. Language, lore, reading, writing, and, more recently, microchips, DVDs, and a few other technological tricks help people build on what their ancestors discovered generations, centuries, and millennia ago. History is a big part of what defines humanity; some may say it’s the biggest part. It led to the present. It led to you. You might as well get comfortable with it.

Chapter 1

Tracing a Path to the Present

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.

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 . . . and ultimately things like microcircuits and NASA Mars rovers. Those people traveled and adapted and innovated all the way to today. They are you and me. In a weird way, then is now.

At some point around 10,000 years ago, not very long after the last Ice Age ended, some people whose technology still consisted largely of sticks and rocks settled down. They were discovering that if they put seeds in the ground, plants would come up there. It worked even better if they stuck around and tended the plants. This realization led to farming.

Historians point to an area they call the Fertile Crescent as a hotbed of early farming. Shaped like a slightly mangled croissant with a big bite taken out of it, the Fertile Crescent stretched from what is now western Iran and the Persian Gulf, up through the river valleys of today’s Iraq, into western Turkey and then hooked south along the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, into northern Africa and the Nile Valley of Egypt. In my flaky croissant analogy, the eastern Mediterranean is the missing bite.

The crescent is also where archeologists have found some of the oldest cities in the world. The mantra for the beginnings of civilization goes something like this: Agriculture means a reliable source of food. People stay put and grow food. Ample food enables population growth. Ample food also gives the growing population commodities to trade. Trade leads to more trade, which leads to more goods and wealth. Not everybody has to work in the fields. Some folks can specialize in shipping goods, for example. Others can specializein building — whether as paid laborers or slaves — or perhaps concentrate on using weapons, either to protect their own wealth or take away that of others. Artisans create jewelry and turn mundane objects (weapons, pots, baskets) into aesthetic statements. Society gets more multilayered. Buildings rise. Cities rise. Trade necessitates keeping track of quantities and values, which necessitates a way to record information. Number systems get invented. Writing follows. Books get written. Ideas blossom. More trade results, cross-cultural influences appear, and so on.

Next thing you know, a English-speaking woman in Los Angeles, whose various ancestors spoke Spanish, Celtic, and Japanese, is sitting in her South Korean-made car, stuck in traffic on the freeway, a style of limited-access road invented in Germany. She’s sipping a cup of coffee harvested in El Salvador, brewed in the Italian style with a machine manufactured in China to Swiss specifications. On her car’s satellite radio, a voice beamed from Toronto is introducing news stories filed by reporters in India, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. She reaches over and switches to a station that features a style of music invented in Jamaica by English-speaking people of African descent.

War! What Is It Good For? Material for History Books, That’s What

A view of history that sees only progress — as in, this advance leads to that terrific advance, which leads to another incredible breakthrough, and so on — doesn’t account for the fact that people are imperfect, even awful. Some are ruthless, some destructive, some just plain stupid. Not you, of course. You’re capable of some pretty great things, I know. Even I, on a good day, may contribute something positive toward history. And we all know or at least know about somebody whose ability to make this a better world is off the charts. But the human race also produces bad characters. Sometimes really bad.

Much of this book deals with war. I wish that weren’t so, but for reasons that anthropologists, psychologists, historians, politicians, and many more have never been quite able to illuminate, there always seems to be somebody willing and even eager to skewer, shoot, blast, or even vaporize somebody else. And history is too often an account of how one group of people, under the banner of Persia or France or Japan or wherever, decided to overrun another group of people. Many such efforts succeeded, if success can be defined as killing other people and stealing their land, resources, wealth, wives, children, and so on.

One of my favorite quotations about war is this one from the historian Barbara Tuchman: “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.” It underscores the fact that so many decisions made in war turn out to be wrong and so many successful wartime strategies have turned out to be the result of dumb luck.

Historians cite the twentieth century as perhaps the worst ever in terms of war and its toll — not because people were necessarily more warlike but because the weapons had grown so much deadlier and transportation (including that of weapons and troops) so much faster. In World War I (1914–1918) and then even more so in World War II (1939–1945), the machines of destruction reached farther and did much more damage than ever before.

Luckily, the wars since WWII have been limited wars in that they were contained to a particular region and didn’t spread too widely, or they were fought with an understanding that neither side was going to escalate the weaponry or the tactics too far. The Vietnam War, a conflict between communist North Vietnam and the anticommunist government of South Vietnam, fits both categories. Each side had allies with deep pockets and big guns. The Soviet Union and China provided supplies and arms to the North Vietnamese, while the U.S. sent military advisors and then, starting in 1965, active troops to fight for South Vietnam. Yet the conflict was somewhat contained. It spread to neighboring Cambodia and Thailand, yes, but not much beyond. The Americans, though deeply suspicious of and armed against both the Chinese and the Soviets, avoided a shooting war with either power. Some say that was a mistake, that the limited tactics employed by U.S. leaders caused the failure of the South Vietnamese effort. Others say that avoiding a larger war was well worth any disadvantage, even worth humiliation.

Were an all-out war to occur in the twenty-first century, humankind has far more than enough destructive power at hand to kill everybody on the planet. So, remember that there’s progress as in trade, peaceful innovation, cultural exchange — and then there’s progress as in thermonuclear weapons.

Human advances also have been disrupted and forestalled by natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, massive storms, floods, droughts, and disease. For example, the Black Death of the fourteenth century, an epidemic of plague that swept through Europe, changed history because it so drastically reduced the continent’s population. Fewer people meant labor was worth more and there was more wealth. More wealth meant more demand for goods, which spurred a search for better trade routes, which led Europeans to places like India, China, and the Americas. The results were great for Europeans but not so great for the Indians, Chinese, and Native Americans.

Appreciating History’s Tapestry

A standard history book analogy is that human events over the centuries are a “rich tapestry.” Whoever originated the tapestry image deserves credit, because it’s not a bad conceit. Yet many readers and students aren’t all that familiar with tapestries, which are decorative fabrics usually hung on a wall or draped over a side table to show off their craftsmanship. Made from weaving threads together in such a way that the colors of the thread form recognizable shapes and scenes, a tapestry may be called “rich” so often because, through much of history, you had to be rich to own one.

The classic tapestry is hand-woven and takes a lot of time and skill to produce. That makes it expensive. It’s complex. Each thread contributes a tiny percentage of the finished image.

History is like that, even if the threads interweave somewhat randomly and the picture is often hard to figure out. Yet with history, you can follow a thread and see where it crisscrosses and crosscrisses (if you will) other threads to get an idea of how the picture formed into what you recognize as the historical present.

Threading backward

History usually gets told in chronological order, which makes sense. Much of this book is in chronological order, but not all of it. That’s because I thought it would be a good idea to break out some of the big influences on how people behave — things like philosophy and religion, styles of warfare, and even individual personalities. Giving them their own parts of the book (Parts III, IV, and V) allows you to come at the same events and eras from different perspectives.

Even when I tell you things in the order they happened, though, I sometimes refer to latter-day developments that have resulted from long ago events, or I use modern examples of how things now can still work pretty much as they did then, whenever then was.

In studying history, it can also help to start at the now and work back, asking the questions that the journalists, pundits, and bloggers did earlier in this chapter — questions about how things got came to be.

Take the war in Iraq, for instance. I mean the one that began in March 2003, when U.S. planes bombed a bunker where Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was thought to be meeting with top staff. (They didn’t get Saddam then but followed up with an invasion that led to his eventual capture and execution.) To trace every thread from that war through time would be too ambitious for this book (and this writer), but you can follow a few of them. Warm up the WABAC, Sherman.

U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisors citied a number of reasons for invading Iraq, among them the need to free Iraqis from the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. Hussein came to power in 1979 when his cousin and predecessor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr stepped down, or — as many believe — was forced from office by Saddam. Al-Bakr’s career included ousting two previous Iraqi military dictators and helping to overthrow Iraq’s monarchy in 1958.

The monarchy dated to the 1920s when Great Britain, which ruled Iraq as a colony, installed King Faisal I without really giving him any power. The king, a descendant of the family of the Prophet Mohammed, wasn’t from Iraq but rather from Mecca Province in what’s now Saudi Arabia. Yet he helped secure Iraq’s independence from Britain before he died.

The League of Nations, a short-lived predecessor to the United Nations, cobbled together what you think of as Iraq in the 1920s. The body put Britain in charge of Baghdad and Basra, two adjacent parts of the old Ottoman Empire (which fell apart in WWI), and then a few years later threw in Mosul to the north.

The Ottomans, based in Istanbul (today in Turkey), had first conquered Baghdad in 1535. It had previously been part of the Mongol Empire and was a center of the Islamic world after Arabs conquered the region in the seventh century. Before that, it was a province of the Persian Empire for 900 years. Before that, a people called the Parthians were in charge, and before that, Alexander the Great conquered Baghdad.

In fact, when Alexander died in 323 BC, he was in Babylon, one of the most famous cities of the ancient world and one of those early cities that arose in the Fertile Crescent after agriculture took hold. Babylon had been the capital of a kingdom established by a people called the Amorites in the nineteenth century BC. Archeologists think the city, whose ruins lie about 50 miles south of present-day Baghdad, was a much older town that grew to city size by 2400 BC, more than 4,400 years ago.

Crossing threads

Okay, so the preceding section has a highly superficial tracing of a thread I’ll call “what was Iraq before, and who ruled it?” It’s so superficial that I kind of skipped over some parts when different conquerors fought over the territory and rule shifted back and forth. For example, a famous Turkish-Mongol conqueror called Tamerlane took over for a while in the fourteenth century. His thread would take you back to his ancestor Genghis Khan, a great Mongol warrior and ruler. And his thread would take you to Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, thirteenth-century emperor of China.

But in tracing that one thread back from twenty-first century Iraq, I crossed a number of other threads. At one intersection was WWI, which was triggered by a Serbian nationalist rebellion against Austrian rule of Bosnia. That war redrew the map of Europe and brought down not just the Ottoman Empire but also the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

The overthrow of the Russian Empire led to the establishment of the Soviet Union — a military superpower and arch rival to the U.S. through much of the late twentieth century. Then there’s the fact that WWI ended with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms imposed upon Germany have been blamed in part for the rise of Adolf Hitler and WWII. The war also led to the establishment of the League of Nations, which lumped together the group of territories known today as Iraq.

Weaving home

The German Empire (another of those that fell in WWI) was a successor to the Holy Roman Empire, a union of Central European territories dating back to Otto the Great in 962 AD. It was considered a successor of the Frankish Empire, established in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the West — essentially naming him the successor to the Roman Emperors, going back to Augustus, whose rule began in 27 BC.

Follow Leo’s popish thread and you’ll get to Pope Urban II, who in 1095 called upon Europe’s Christians to join together in a war against the Turks, especially the Seljuk Dynasty of Turks who controlled the city of Jerusalem and the land surrounding it, considered the Christian Holy Land.

Urban’s war became the First Crusade, followed by at least nine more crusades over several centuries in which Christians from Europe traveled east with the express purpose to kill Muslims in western Asia. Not surprisingly, these incursions contributed to enduring hard-feelings by many Muslims against the West and Christians.

Some people may find a thread between the Crusades and latter-day anti-U.S. sentiments, such as those held by the terrorist group Al Qaeda. However, that thread also crosses the one in which the United Nations partitioned what had been British Palestine (another post-WWI territory) into Arab and Jewish areas to make way for a modern nation of Israel.

Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The American response to Al Qaeda’s aggression was a War on Terror(ism) that included the invasion of Iraq, whose leader was thought to be aiding terrorist groups. And I’m back where I started.

Making the Connections

If you’re not thrilled with the tapestry analogy of the previous section, how about the game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? In it, you try to link any actor or movie to the veteran screen star Bacon by associating somebody who appeared in such-and-such film, who worked with so-and-so, who was married to what’s-his-face, who directed the TV series that starred the actress who had a cameo role in a movie in which Bacon also starred. You get the idea.

The game calls for you to make the connection in six people or less. So let’s see if I can do that with Alexander the Great, mentioned earlier in this chapter as having died in Babylon, and the Iraq War that started in 2003.

1. Alexander’s conquests spread Greek influence around the Mediterranean Sea.

2. Romans embraced aspects of Greek religion and philosophy.

3. The Roman Empire switched to Christianity.

4. The Roman Catholic Church preserved ancient writings containing classical (Greek and Roman) ideas through the Middle Ages.