Synopses & Reviews
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
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"Dazzling." --Boston Globe Book Section
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“A creative and compelling synthesis of ideas, Smails book provides an engaging and invigorating analysis of our history.” Science (AAAS)
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"A provocative thesis. . . . Radically rethinks the relationship between biology and culture."--London Review of Books
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"Relax and enjoy. It's a good read, and it makes you think."--New Scientist
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“An intelligent disquiet runs through these pages.” New York Times Book Review
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"[An] intriguing little book."--American Scientist
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“A provocative thesis. . . . Radically rethinks the relationship between biology and culture.” Steven Mithen
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“Relax and enjoy. Its a good read, and it makes you think.” London Review Of Books
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“[An] intriguing little book.” New Scientist
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“Dazzling.” American Scientist
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“A pioneering work.” Boston Globe Book Section
Synopsis
"This is surely a new paradigm for the study of history that will be regarded as revolutionary but which is also well justified. To my knowledge, no other book integrates the study of human history with principles of biological and cultural evolution on such an ambitious scale."David Sloan Wilson, author of
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society"This is one of the most exciting books I've read in years. It is so accessible, so groundbreaking, so stimulating, so important that I imagine the next generation of historians will be deeply influenced by what Smail has to say here. Simply dazzling."Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights
About the Author
Daniel Lord Smail is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of Imaginary Cartographies (1999), which won the American Historical Associations Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and the Social Science History Associations Presidents Award; The Consumption of Justice (2003), which won the Law and Society Associations James Willard Hurst Prize; and co-editor of Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (2003).
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Toward Reunion in History
1. The Grip of Sacred History
2. Resistance
3. Between Darwin and Lamarck
4. The New Neurohistory
5. Civilization and Psychotropy
Epilogue: Looking Ahead
Notes
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index