Research Catalog

Civilizations : culture, ambition, and the transformation of nature

Title: Civilizations : culture, ambition, and the transformation of nature / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
Author: Fernández-Armesto, Felipe.
Publication: New York : Touchstone, 2002, ©2001.

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Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	CB151 .F47 2002	Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 545 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization. To the author, Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a society's relationship to climate, geography, and ecology are paramount in determining its degree of success. "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations," he writes, "it is arranged environment by environment, rather than. By. Or society by society." Thus, for example, tundra civilizations of Ice Age Europe are linked with those of the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Mound Builders with the deforesters of 11th-century Europe. Civilizations brilliantly connects the world of ecologist, geologist, and geographer with the panorama of cultural history. - Back cover.

Subjects

Genre/Form

History.
History (form)

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Itch to civilize -- Waste land: desert, tundra, ice: Helm of ice, ice worlds and tundra as human habitats -- Death of earth, adaptation and counteradaptation in deserts of sand -- Leaves of grass, barely cultivable grasslands: Sweepings of the wind, prairie and grassy savanna -- Highway of civilizations, Eurasian steppe -- Under the rain, civilization in tropical lowlands and postglacial forests: Wild woods, postglacial and temperate woodland -- Hearts of darkness, tropical lowlands -- Shining fields of mud, alluvial soils in drying climates: Lone and level sands, misleading cases in the Near East -- Of shoes and rice, transcending environments of origin in China and India -- Mirrors of sky, civilizing highlands: Gardens of the clouds, highland civilizations of the new world -- Climb to paradise, highland civilizations of the old world -- Water margins, civilizations shaped by the sea: Allotments of the gods, small-island civilizations -- View from the shore: nature of seaboard civilizations -- Chasing the monsoon, seaboard civilizations of maritime Asia -- Tradition of Ulysses, Greek and Roman seaboards -- Breaking the waves, domestication of the oceans: Almost the last environment, rise of oceanic civilizations -- Refloating Atlantis, making of Atlantic civilization -- Atlantic and after, Atlantic supremacy and the global outlook.

ISBN

0743202481
9780743202480
074320249X
9780743202497

LCCN

2001018154

OCLC

ocm45799376
SCSB-14379689

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library