How the modern world was made
From the first farms to the Cold War: the long chain of events behind the world we live in. 8 guides, about 70 minutes of reading.
- The agricultural revolution and the first cities
Why settled farming appeared, what it cost, and how it produced writing, law and inequality.
- Ancient Egypt: three thousand years on the Nile
How a river, a calendar and a god-king produced one of the longest lasting states in history.
- Greece and Rome: the political inheritance
Athenian democracy, the Roman republic and empire, and the institutional ideas that outlived both.
- The Middle Ages in Europe
Lords, monasteries, towns and plague: what a thousand years between Rome and the Renaissance actually looked like.
- The Age of Exploration
Why European ships crossed the oceans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how the exchange that followed changed every continent.
- The Industrial Revolution
Coal, cotton and steam: how production moved from hands and homes to machines and factories, starting in eighteenth-century Britain.
- The Second World War
The deadliest conflict in history, from the rise of fascism to the atomic bomb, and the world order it left behind.
- The Cold War
Forty-five years of rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought with nuclear threats, proxy wars and propaganda.