Big Ideas from History: A history of the world for you
Cover -- Title -- Contents -- Introduction: What Is History for? -- Part One: Prehistory -- How Did the Universe Begin? -- How Did the Earth Get Made? -- How Does Evolution Work? -- Your (Enormous) Family Tree -- How Did We Get to Be Human? -- The First Tools -- How Did We Start Speaking? -- Our Missing Cousins -- How Humans Spread Around the World -- How Religion Started -- From Hunter-Gatherers to Farmers -- How Money Was Invented -- Part Two: Angent History -- What the Buddha Thought -- Why the Ancient Greeks Had Lots of Gods -- What Christian Thought Can Teach Us -- Why Do Civilisations Sometimes Go Backwards? -- Part Three: The Middle Ages -- The Islamic Golden Age -- How Short and Hard Life Was (and How Painful As Well) -- What Were Monasteries For? -- What Old Maps Tell You -- Part Four: The Beginnings of The Modern World -- Renaissance Thinking -- Why the Aztecs Were Defeated -- The Native Americans -- A Brief History of Pandemic Diseases -- Why Did Millions of Africans End Up In the Americas? -- When Was Printing Invented? -- How We Invented Science -- Why We Invented Forks and Chopsticks (and the Difference Between a Ladder and a Pendulum) -- The Beginnings of Religious Tolerance -- Part Five: Industraialisation -- The Discovery of Fossil Fuels -- Famine (and the New Problem of Eating Too Much) -- The Conquest of the Night -- The Birth of Travel and Speed -- The Story of Cities -- The Birth of Central Heating (and the Hot Bath) -- The Rise of Shopping -- How Education Changed (and How It Might Change in the Future) -- Why Lots of People Stopped Being Religious -- The Birth of Art Galleries -- Part Six: The Modern World -- How Everyone Got the Vote -- Why It Matters What We Count -- The Rise of the News -- The Increasing Power of Advertising -- The Invention of Childhood -- What Was Communism? -- What Is Capitalism? -- Animals.
