Tom Standage
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English
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From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history. Throughout human history. certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period. This book tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens...
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English
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From the Publisher: From the bestselling author of A History of the World in Six Glasses, this is a riveting history of humanity told through the foods we eat. Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance; it has acted as a tool of social transformation, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. And today, in the culmination of a process that has been...
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From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Tom Standage chronicles the increasingly sophisticated ways people shared information with each other, spontaneously and organically, down the centuries. With the rise of newspapers in the nineteenth century, then radio and television,...
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Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. Now, he returns with a provocative account of a sometimes-overlooked form of technology--personal transportation--and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia. Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel--a device that didn't catch on until a couple...
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The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways....
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The more we ponder, the odder the world can seem.
How do footballers get their shirt numbers?
Why does having daughters make couples more likely to divorce?
How do you move a horse from one country to another?
What counts as a journey into space?
The keen minds at the Economist contemplate all these questions and more in their quest for the globe's most extraordinary quandaries and conundrums, with bizarre facts and headscratchers that show the...