What You'll Learn:
What happens when two world class historians write an 11-volume history of humankind over the course of four decades and then distill from those 10,000 pages the most common, instructive themes? You get The Lessons of History.
Key Insights:
- Human existence has always been a tenuous affair.
- Geography has shaped patterns of human settlement, but people aren’t bound by it the way they used to be.
- Human nature has changed very little over the millennia.
- Theories of superior races fall apart quickly in the light of history.
- Peace has been extremely rare in human history—and moments of peace only come through conquest.
- The particulars vary, but civilizations follow the general outline of humble beginnings, rise, decline, and dissolution.
- No civilization truly dies.
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