Main entry:

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, author.

Title & Author:

Civilizations : culture, ambition, and the transformation of nature / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

Publication:

New York, N.Y. : Free Press, [2001]
©2001

Description:

xii, 545 pages ; 25 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction: The itch to civilize -- The waste land : desert, tundra, ice. The helm of ice : ice worlds and tundra as human habitats ; The death of earth : adaptation and counteradaptation in deserts of sand -- Leaves of grass: barely cultivable grasslands. The sweepings of the wind : prairie and grassy savanna ; The highway of civilizations : the Eurasian steppe -- Under the rain : civilization in tropical lowlands and postglacial forests. The wild woods : postglacial and temperate woodland ; Hearts of darkness : tropical lowlands -- The shining fields of mud : alluvial soils in drying climates. The lone and level sands : misleading cases in the Near East ; Of shoes and rice : transcending environments of origin in China and India -- The mirrors of sky : civilizing highlands. The gardens of the clouds : the highland civilizations of the new world ; The climb to paradise : the highland civilizations of the old world -- The water margins : civilizations shaped by the sea. The allotments of the gods : small-island civilizations ; The view from the shore : the nature of seaboard civilizations ; Chasing the monsoon : seaboard civilizations of maritime Asia ; The tradition of Ulysses : the Greek and Roman seaboards -- Breaking the waves : the domestication of the oceans. Almost the last environment : the rise of oceanic civilizations ; Refloating Atlantis : the making of Atlantic civilization ; The Atlantic and after : Atlantic supremacy and the global outlook.

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.

Resources:
Sample text
Table of contents
Contributor biographical information
Publisher description

ISBN:

0743202481
9780743202480
074320249X (pbk.)
9780743202497 (pbk.)

Subject:

Civilization History.
Human geography.
Human ecology.
Nature Effect of human beings on.
Ambition History.
Social ecology.
Civilisation Histoire.
Écologie humaine.
Êtres humains Influence sur la nature.
Ambition Histoire.
Écologie sociale.
human ecology.
15.50 general world history; history of great parts of the world, peoples, civilizations: general.
Ambition
Civilization
Zivilisation
Geschichte
Zivilisationsprozess
Nature.
Culture.

Form/genre:

History
History (form)

Holdings:

Location: Library main 216491
Call No.: CB151 .F47 2001
Status: Available