The Wars Of Yesterday

Though persistently overshadowed by the Great War in historical memory, the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 were among the most consequential of the early twentieth century. By pitting the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro against a diminished Ottoman Empire—and subsequently against one another—they anticipated many of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare even as they produced the tense regional politics that helped spark World War I. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this volume applies the social and cultural insights of the “new military history” to revisit this critical episode with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians during wartime.

This book offers an exploration of unique laws and customs placed around warfare throughout history, from Indigenous Australians to the American Civil War.

From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.

How international is international humanitarian law? The Laws of Yesterday's Wars 2: From Ancient India to East Africa, together with its companion volume, The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars: From Indigenous Australians to the American Civil War (Brill-Nijhoff, 2021), attempts to answer that question. It offers a culture-by-culture account of various unique restrictions placed on warfare over time. Containing essays by a range of laws of war academics and practitioners, it approaches the laws of yesterday’s wars from a wide cross-section of history and culture, seeking to find any common ground and to demonstrate a history of international law outside the usual confines of its ‘development’ by Europeans and its later ‘contributions.’ This volume includes studies on Japanese, Islamic and Eastern Native American rules of war.

A three-thousand year history of the world that examines the causes of war and the search for peace In three thousand years of history, China has spent at least eleven centuries at war. The Roman Empire was in conflict during at least 50 per cent of its lifetime. Since 1776, the United States has spent over one hundred years at war. The dream of peace has been universal in the history of humanity. So why have we so rarely been able to achieve it? In A Political History of the World, Jonathan Holslag has produced a sweeping history of the world, from the Iron Age to the present, that investigates the causes of conflict between empires, nations and peoples and the attempts at diplomacy and cosmopolitanism. A birds-eye view of three thousand years of history, the book illuminates the forces shaping world politics from Ancient Egypt to the Han Dynasty, the Pax Romana to the rise of Islam, the Peace of Westphalia to the creation of the United Nations. This truly global approach enables Holslag to search for patterns across different eras and regions, and explore larger questions about war, diplomacy, and power. Has trade fostered peace? What are the limits of diplomacy? How does environmental change affect stability? Is war a universal sin of power? At a time when the threat of nuclear war looms again, this is a much-needed history intended for students of international politics, and anyone looking for a background on current events.

The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's final work, posted to his publisher the day before his tragic death, brings the destruction of a war-torn Europe vividly to life. Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna; its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. A truthful and passionate acc[Bokinfo].

An examination of the ideas and events that led to World War II, events during the war, and how they led to subsequent wars, including the "war on terror," written as a series of letters from a man to his niece or nephew.

From Jules Verne to the Jetsons, from a 500-passenger flying wing to an anti-aircraft flying buzz-saw, the vision of the future as seen through the eyes of the past demonstrates the play of the American imagination on the canvas of the future.