Simply the best book about the Aztecs I’ve
ever read! I immediately started telling my students about it, quoting it in
lectures, and generally raving about it to anyone who would listen.
After
listening to it on audiobook, I immediately bought a print copy so I could read
it again. This is an incredibly rigorously researched and carefully told
history, with clear guidance to readers on what is historically certain,
probable, likely, speculative, or unknown.
But is also a beautifully written
human drama that combines grand-scale political history with intimate personal
stories and evocative descriptions of everyday life in the Nahuatl world. I
will never forget Flamingo Snake!
In November 1519, Hernando Cortes walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story-and the story of what happened afterwards-has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by…
A psychologist I happened to meet on a food
tour in Atlanta recommended this to me when she learned I was a historian.
I
admit to being dubious because I generally don’t have much time for sweeping
histories of humanity, but this is of an entirely different order. It starts
with a compelling question: when and how did we – humanity – get ‘stuck’ in a
set of relations defined by extremes of social, economic, and political
inequality and incapable of imagining any alternative?
It then spends most of
the book demonstrating that it wasn’t ever thus, engaging in extraordinarily
detailed exploration of early human history to overturn a whole host of our
most common misconceptions about human society. Mind-blowing and life-changing!
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction…
This is a great one to read in tandem with The
Dawn of Everything, as they cover a similarly enormous timespan but in very
different ways.
The provocative suggestion that humans might have invented
agriculture primarily as a means of having more regular and reliable access to
booze was… unexpected! The more modern eras of history are also handled
punchily, including some forceful overturning of the most enduring
misconceptions about the 1920s prohibition of alcohol in the United States.
Forysth’s telling of human history through our myriad, complicated ways of
getting drunk and all the social and legal rules about how and how not to get
drunk is also hilarious. This is greatly enhanced by the audiobook narration of
Richard Hughes.
THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ANYONE WHO ENJOYS A TIPPLE . . . OR TWO . . . OR TEN!
Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there's drink there's drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. Tracing humankind's love affair with booze from our primate ancestors through to Prohibition, it answers every possible question:
What did people drink? How much? Who did the drinking? Of the many possible reasons, why?
On the way, learn about the Neolithic Shamans, who drank to communicate with the spirit world (no pun intended), marvel…
This book examines alcohol production,
consumption, regulation, and commerce, alongside the gendered, medical,
religious, ideological, and cultural practices that surrounded alcohol from
1850 to 1950.
It summarizes developments in a global framework to show how deeply
alcohol was involved in central processes shaping the modern world: industrialization,
empire-building, and the growth of the nation-state. It demonstrates how
empires were partly built through alcohol, in both economic and ideological
terms, yet alcohol production, trade, and consumption were also sites for
anti-colonial resistance. It also argues that alcohol regulations and public
health discourses increasingly revealed the intent and reach of state power to
monitor and police citizens, as well as the legitimization of that power
through nationalism.
