The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of The Twenty-First Century - Hardcover

Fromkin, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679446095 ISBN 13: 9780679446095

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

How did we get here?

David Fromkin provides arresting and dramatic answers to the questions we ask ourselves as we approach the new millennium. He maps and illuminates the paths by which humanity came to its current state, giving coherence and meaning to the main turning points along the way by relating them to a vision of things to come. His unconventional approach to narrating universal history is to focus on the relevant past and to single out the eight critical evolutions that brought the world from the Big Bang to the eve of the twenty-first century.

He describes how human beings survived by adapting to a world they had not yet begun to make their own, and how they created and developed organized society, religion, and warfare. He emphasizes the transformative forces of art and the written word, and the explosive effects of scientific discoveries. He traces the course of commerce, exploration, the growth of law, and the quest for freedom, and details how their convergence led to the world of today.

History's great movements and moments are here: the rise of the first empires in Mesopotamia; the exodus from Pharaoh's Egypt; the coming of Moses, Confucius, the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad; the fall of the Roman Empire; the rise of China; Vasco da Gama finding the sea road to India that led to unification of the globe under European leadership. Connections are made: the invention of writing, of the alphabet, of the printing press, and of the computer lead to an information revolution that is shaping the world of tomorrow. The industrial, scientific, and technological revolutions are related to the credit revolution that lies behind today's world economy. The eighty-year world war of the twentieth century, which ended only on August 31, 1994, when the last Russian troops left German soil, points the way to a long but perhaps troubled peace in the twenty-first.

Where are we now? The Way of the World asserts that the human race has been borne on the waters of a great river--a river of scientific and technological innovation that has been flowing in the Western world for a thousand years, and that now surges forward more strongly than ever. This river highway, it says, has become the way of the world; and because the constitutional and open society that the United States champions is uniquely suited to it, America will be the lucky country of the centuries to come. Fromkin concludes by examining some of the choices that lie ahead for a world still constrained by its past and by human nature but endowed by science with new powers and possibilities. He pictures exciting prospects ahead--if the United States takes the lead, and can develop wisdom on a scale to match its good fortune.

About this title

About the Author

David Fromkin is Professor of International Relations, History, and Law at Boston University. He is the author of In the Time of the Americans, a History Book Club selection, and A Peace to End All Peace, a national best-seller, which was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was singled out by the New York Times Book Review as an "Editors' Choice," one of the thirteen "Best Books of the Year". He lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap

et here?<br><br>David Fromkin provides arresting and dramatic answers to the questions we ask ourselves as we approach the new millennium. He maps and illuminates the paths by which humanity came to its current state, giving coherence and meaning to the main turning points along the way by relating them to a vision of things to come. His unconventional approach to narrating universal history is to focus on the relevant past and to single out the eight critical evolutions that brought the world from the Big Bang to the eve of the twenty-first century.<br><br>He describes how human beings survived by adapting to a world they had not yet begun to make their own, and how they created and developed organized society, religion, and warfare. He emphasizes the transformative forces of art and the written word, and the explosive effects of scientific discoveries. He traces the course of commerce, exploration, the growth of law, and the quest for freedom, and details how their convergence led to the

Reviews

As its subtitle indicates, this is a broad, ambitious work. Boston University historian Fromkin (A Peace to End All Peace) guides readers on a whirlwind journey from the dawn of time to the present, touching on subjects as wide-ranging as Jane Goodall's observations of chimpanzees, Pizarro's conquest of Peru and Thomas Edison's ingenious inventions. The main subject is human civilization: what it is; how it came about; why civilizations rose and fell; what the future of civilization itself may be. Beginning with the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, humanity gradually transformed from a herd of nomadic hunter-gatherers to an ordered society. The ancients invented agriculture, politics and religion?all while struggling with the ever-present barbarians who threatened to destroy them. Central to Fromkin's story is his account of how Western civilization?although by no means the most "advanced" civilization of its day?managed to conquer and eclipse its rivals and dominate the world to such an extent that "modernization" and "Westernization" have come to be synonymous. The final section, on the future of civilization, sometimes sinks into banalities ("For countries, as for people, becoming too wealthy or too powerful tends to be dangerous"). Of course, any work that combines such brevity with such broad scope is bound to be somewhat superficial. Nevertheless, Fromkin is a skillful raconteur with a keen eye for the telling anecdote and a conquistador's power to cover vast swaths of territory in a short amount of time.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A skimpy survey of all human history, marked by a curious thesis. As Fromkin, who teaches international relations, history, and law at Boston University (A Peace to End All Peace, 1989), relates it, some years ago a Wall Street hedge fund manager challenged him to tell the story of humanity in the universewhere else?and make it whole. With financiers, one supposes, not particularly concerned with the niceties of political correctness, Fromkin answers that challenge with a World Civ 101 syllabus, one that views history as a tale of constant improvements leading to the only civilization still surviving, the scientific one of the modern worldand, more pointedly, the civilization of the US, which he believes has reached an apogee of mortal achievement. Fromkin begins at the beginning, brushing aside countless eras and a great deal of modern scholarship to deliver unilluminating statements like Our remote primate ancestors were some sort of apes. He proceeds to inform his readers that the Sumerians of the Uruk period more or less invented civilization, but it was one without a soula development that had to await the advent of Judeo-Christian thought. He also maintains that the world owes a debt to the West for its gift of rationalism, which is the progenitor of modern science, even if that doctrine was inconveniently delivered at the point of a sword and the end of a musket; and that robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan are to be forgiven for their misdeeds because, after all, they encouraged dreams of world peace. Fromkins rose-colored and simplistic view of scientific progress and the superiority of American virtues is oddly refreshing, old-fashioned as it is. But aside from bankers needing a refresher course in the humanities, its hard to imagine any other audience for his work. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Historian and best-selling author Fromkin conducts the reader on a fascinating journey through human time, commencing at the dawn of civilization and concluding at the brink of the twenty-first century. Employing an engaging storytelling technique, the author interweaves a broad range of complex information into a comprehensible and condensed format, identifying the major social, educational, scientific, economic, and governmental trends he believes have significantly contributed to the evolution of humankind. As Fromkin moves seamlessly through time, he is able to demonstrate how many seemingly unrelated actions and events inevitably led to the emergence of the cultural mores and institutions that characterize contemporary society in what he terms the American centuries. Solid narrative history sure to appeal to the same type of audience that made How the Irish Saved Civilization (1996) such a huge hit. Margaret Flanagan

This is a conscious attempt to relate world history in about 250 pages. Actually, its eight stages of history are set in the West, from the emergence of humans in Africa to the rise of Western governments. Fromkin sees history as natural, not divine, "the story of the human race in the world," and believes that humans are therefore responsible for their own future. For high school, public, and college libraries. (LJ 10/15/98)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

       Tens of thousands of years ago, in a cave in southwestern Europe, a shaman clad in bearskin told tales of past and future to his rapt followers. A flickering flame cast moving shadows on the wall. Blood had been spilled; spirits had been invoked. Speaking in a low, hypnotic tone, the shaman made life and death, the seasons of the Earth and the movements of the sky, intelligible to his people. He retold familiar stories of the tribe to which they belonged: its wanderings; the long-ago ancestor from whom they had descended; and the destiny that had been foretold for them.

"Can you do that for us today?" asked the Wall Street hedge-fund manager over a luncheon in midtown Manhattan. He had been told that I was teaching at a university and was challenging me. "Can you tell the story of humanity in the universe and make it whole?"

"Well, actually, yes, I can," I said, "though of course I have to do it in my own way." My way of telling it--though it begins with the creation and multiplication of civilizations, and their lives and deaths--concentrates mostly on the lives that led to the only civilization still surviving, the scientific one of the modern world, and on the prospects before it.


       How do you tell the story of Mankind? Oddly, I used to know someone whose job it once had been to answer that question. It was my friend Walter Fairservis, and the reason he had to answer the question was that he was helping to design a new Hall of Asian Man for New York's American Museum of Natural History that would provide a panorama of Asian history.

Walter, who died a few years back, was an anthropologist and archaeologist, but above all an adventurer: a forerunner in real life of the fictitious Indiana Jones. He was a big man, an outdoors type with a weatherbeaten look, rumpled and shaggy. His special field of scholarship was the origin of civilizations. He excavated mainly in Egypt and in Pakistan, but he also roamed the rest of the world, whether on camelback or jet airplane, comparing the beginnings of ancient times in one place with those in another.

Asia is the continent on which human civilization first appeared; its flourishing is a long story, too big to be told comprehensively. Fairservis recognized that the most he could do was to select displays that would get a few of the most important points across to viewers.

Visitors had a choice of two entrances to the exhibition. One took you through chronologically, beginning with the origins of human life and culture. If you followed this path, you came away with a sense of how much material progress the human race has made in its relatively short life span.

The other entrance, as I remember it, displayed a marketplace in central Asia as it might have appeared in the time of Marco Polo (a bit before 1300 a.d.), with goods from an enormous wealth of cultures. From there, you could choose your path to whichever culture most interested you. Viewers came away not only with a sense of the broad range of civilizations contained in Asia alone, but also, it may be assumed, with an idea of the extraordinary variety of human society in the world as a whole.

Material progress, and the variety of cultures: here were two observations about the history of the past that were important and true. Visitors could observe for themselves, and draw their own conclusions. It seemed to me that this was about as much as you could communicate successfully in the course of one visit.

I try to do something similar. I focus on an aspect of human experience: on change, in particular with regard to the way we organize and govern ourselves, and how we deal with the issues of war and peace and survival. I concentrate on some of the turning points in history and look at where they have led, and where they will lead in the future if we continue on the same path. Narrated in such a way, the turns in the life of the human race form a story that can be outlined in no more time than it takes to tell a tale, as a shaman would, around an evening campfire.


       Like those who first put their hands and minds to the writing of history, Herodotus and Thucydides, Greeks of the fifth century b.c., I will deal essentially with the high drama of battle and politics. If instead I were surveying the history of art or science, of literature or music, I would work from a different outline and would have a different tale to narrate.

Telling one story necessarily means not telling another. Little will be said in the pages that follow about artistic creation or spiritual wisdom; there are no discussions of Shakespeare or Dante, of Mozart or Beethoven, of Leonardo or Michelangelo. The tale of how human beings have organized themselves in separate independent societies that sometimes cooperate but more often clash with one another, needs to be told on its own if it is to be told at a manageable length.

A glance at the table of contents shows that I conceive of a dozen radical turns as having brought us from the African forests of millions of years ago to the world of the 1990s and beyond. There is nothing special about the number twelve; another historian, organizing matters otherwise, would do it in some other number of headings and permutations. What follows is only a view from one person's perspective.


       Perhaps there were, are, or will be other universes, but we can know nothing of them. It is our universe that we speak of as the universe; we look to its birth for the framework of our beliefs and institutions.

The stories of creation told by the shamans of nomad tribes and the priests of earlier civilizations were factually untrue, but they held meaning. In the full sense of the word, they were myths.

Uniquely, the civilization to which we belong at the end of the twentieth century tells a tale of creation that is true--which is to say, unlike all others, it is based upon evidence. But the story changes all the time, as new evidence comes to light. Moreover, it is incomplete, and in its incompleteness it cannot tell us what--if anything--creation signifies. Our scientists tell us what happened, but they haven't a clue as to how or why. Is the universe a cosmic accident or the result of a cosmic design? Science doesn't know; so we may believe whatever we choose.


       A peculiarity of the modern world, as regards our account of genesis, is that only the relative few who are scientifically literate know and understand what "we" believe. Few are conversant with today's cosmogony--our story of creation--or cosmology, our knowledge of how the universe functions. More than half the adults in the United States do not know that every year the Earth orbits around the sun. Yet a scientific elite is expanding the frontiers of their own knowledge to an extent that seems almost miraculous. Recently, The New York Times reported that scientists have looked back 11 billion years into space and have photographed the universe as it was then--"some 85 percent of the way back to the beginning of time." Since then astronomers have peered even further.

The age-old vision of life and creation that would have emerged from a shaman's songs and tales in times past would have been familiar to the tribesmen to whom he chanted. The modern vision, when occasionally we catch sight of it, comes to most of us as surprising news. Of course scientists themselves disagree, even about fundamental issues. Some of them take the view that the universe holds to an essentially cyclical course and therefore had no beginning and will have no end. Others believe it was brought into existence by a Creator, who had no beginning. The most striking current theory, however, is that there was a beginning, and that it came with a Big Bang.


       Billions of years ago--astronomers continue to disagree about the date but most place it somewhere between 11 billion and 15 billion b.c.--our universe exploded into existence. From the detonation came space, time, matter, and energy.

In its first second, the universe began to expand and it continues to do so. For all we know, it may go on expanding forever. Its size today can be described but not imagined. Our estimates of it have to be enlarged repeatedly. At last count there were perhaps a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Early in 1996 we learned that there are fifty billion such galaxies in the sky; previously we had thought there were "only" ten billion. And more space is being created all the time.

Our tiny corner of the universe--the corner dominated by our local star, the Sun--took shape long after Creation. The solar system, the Sun and all that revolves around it, emerged less than five billion years ago.

The Earth is an assemblage of waste materials left over from the creation of the solar system: bits of debris that whirled about aimlessly in space, and then collided, smashing into one another and merging, like so many lumps of scrap metal crushed together by a compactor. The Earth came into being 4.6 billion years ago, just after the birth of the Sun.

Life on our planet seems to have sprung up from the then-molten Earth somewhere between 3 and 4.2 billion years ago. We think that it took the form of single-celled microbes, organisms without a nucleus, that lived in a kind of "primeval soup." One of these was able to replicate, becoming the germ of all future life; from it all else followed.

But, again, we don't quite know how. For although we believe that this simple germ of life spawned many species, we haven't yet solved the riddle of how cells with a true nucleus came into being. We do have some clues, however.

New evidence suggests that the minute organisms from which the animal kingdom emerged may have "crawled or slithered between grains of mud or sand in primordia...

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679446095
• ISBN 13: 9780679446095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 253