World War I | The Yanks Are Coming | 2

Conventional accounts of American history tend to focus on the people at the top—presidents, generals, CEOs, and other influential figures and their struggles, ambitions, hopes, and dreams. But what about average people? The ones who had to live with the consequences of elite decisions, and who often struggled in obscurity? In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn aims to tell their story, providing a bottom-up view of American history focusing on Indigenous people, Black Americans, women, laborers, and activists.

Our guide outlines Zinn’s interpretation of significant events, themes, and historical trends in American history. Through our commentary, we’ll provide alternative opinions on the motivations behind and consequences of historical events. We’ll also further explain Zinn’s approach to history and provide additional context for his arguments as well as his perspective on events that happened after the book’s publication.

In The Silk Roads, historian Peter Frankopan identifies Central and Western Asia as the crossroads of human civilization, the birthplace of the world’s major religions, the battleground where the great empires of history rose and fell, and the garden from which today’s global economy first sprouted. He argues that understanding the East is crucial to our understanding of the world—particularly for Westerners who have lost this global perspective.

In ancient times, trade routes known as the Silk Roads first brought European merchants to the luxury markets of the East, enabling the flow of both material goods and ideas from East to West. According to Frankopan, the Silk Roads have always been history’s crucial connection point, spreading not just luxury goods like silk and spices, but also technology, religion, languages, cultures, ideologies, and even conflicts and diseases. In this guide, we explore Frankopan’s history of the Silk Roads, while also incorporating insights and feedback from other scholars to supplement his analysis.

According to writers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer represents a modern-day Prometheus, the Greek Titan eternally punished for stealing fire from the gods and imparting it to humanity. In American Prometheus, Bird and Sherwin provide a comprehensive biography of Oppenheimer, a historical figure best known for developing the atomic bomb. And although Bird and Sherwin focus on Oppenheimer’s work on the bomb, they also shed light on his personal life, detailing his evolution from adolescent activist to eventual political martyr.

In this guide, we’ll examine Oppenheimer’s life before the bomb, his role in developing the atomic bomb at the Manhattan Project, and the politically motivated security hearing that saw him lose his security clearance in 1954. To conclude, we’ll touch on Oppenheimer’s transformation post-hearing, detailing his exile from the upper ranks of US government. Throughout this guide, we’ll also present further historical context for key events and assess the contemporary impact of Oppenheimer’s work.

Conventional accounts of American history tend to focus on the people at the top—presidents, generals, CEOs, and other influential figures and their struggles, ambitions, hopes, and dreams. But what about average people? The ones who had to live with the consequences of elite decisions, and who often struggled in obscurity? In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn aims to tell their story, providing a bottom-up view of American history focusing on Indigenous people, Black Americans, women, laborers, and activists.

Our guide outlines Zinn’s interpretation of significant events, themes, and historical trends in American history. Through our commentary, we’ll provide alternative opinions on the motivations behind and consequences of historical events. We’ll also further explain Zinn’s approach to history and provide additional context for his arguments as well as his perspective on events that happened after the book’s publication.

In The Silk Roads, historian Peter Frankopan identifies Central and Western Asia as the crossroads of human civilization, the birthplace of the world’s major religions, the battleground where the great empires of history rose and fell, and the garden from which today’s global economy first sprouted. He argues that understanding the East is crucial to our understanding of the world—particularly for Westerners who have lost this global perspective.

In ancient times, trade routes known as the Silk Roads first brought European merchants to the luxury markets of the East, enabling the flow of both material goods and ideas from East to West. According to Frankopan, the Silk Roads have always been history’s crucial connection point, spreading not just luxury goods like silk and spices, but also technology, religion, languages, cultures, ideologies, and even conflicts and diseases. In this guide, we explore Frankopan’s history of the Silk Roads, while also incorporating insights and feedback from other scholars to supplement his analysis.

What can you learn from 5,000 years of history? Are we in truly novel times, or do we face the same problems that the Romans and Egyptians faced 2,000 years ago?

Will & Ariel Durant, Pulitzer Prize winning historians, are famed for writing The Story of Civilization, a massive 9766-page, 11-volume treatise of the entirety of Western history. They compiled the most important recurring patterns in this book. Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater, considers this one of his 3 must-read books.

Learn how human nature hasn’t changed over thousands of years, how societies cycle between inequality and redistribution like a heartbeat, and why eventually all civilizations fall.

Conventional accounts of American history tend to focus on the people at the top—presidents, generals, CEOs, and other influential figures and their struggles, ambitions, hopes, and dreams. But what about average people? The ones who had to live with the consequences of elite decisions, and who often struggled in obscurity? In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn aims to tell their story, providing a bottom-up view of American history focusing on Indigenous people, Black Americans, women, laborers, and activists.

Our guide outlines Zinn’s interpretation of significant events, themes, and historical trends in American history. Through our commentary, we’ll provide alternative opinions on the motivations behind and consequences of historical events. We’ll also further explain Zinn’s approach to history and provide additional context for his arguments as well as his perspective on events that happened after the book’s publication.

In Manufacturing Consent, authors Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman explore how the American media frames events and creates narratives that serve the interests of the nation’s political, economic, and social elite. They argue that control of the media in the United States does not take the form of direct state censorship or a formal conspiracy to manage the news. Rather, there is a powerful set of informal restrictions and controls that limit what journalists cover—and how they cover it.

In this guide, we’ve streamlined and updated the authors’ 1988 analysis of the mainstream media to incorporate themes, topics, and examples that are more relevant for today’s audience, including the internet, social media, and the rise of “fake news.”

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari uses concepts from biology, history, and economics to tell the story of us, Homo sapiens. We start 2.5 million years ago, when Sapiens make their historical entrance, and end in the future, when the creation of an artificially created superhuman race may mark the end of the Sapiens species. Along the way, we learn how our ability to create imagined realities led to our dominance over other species. We watch as the Agricultural Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution change our species in lasting, and not always positive, ways.

Ultimately, we’re left with one question: As we design our future, who do we want to become? Asking the right questions may be more important than finding the right answers. Read this summary to explore our history as a species—in doing so, you’ll see today’s world in an entirely new way.