A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich

By E. H. Gombrich

In 1935, with a doctorate in paintings background and no prospect of a task, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was once invited through a publishing acquaintance to aim a historical past of the realm for more youthful readers. Amazingly, he accomplished the duty in an excessive six weeks, and Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser was once released in Vienna to quick luck, and is now on hand in seventeen languages the world over.

towards the tip of his lengthy lifestyles, Gombrich embarked upon a revision and, finally, an English translation. a bit heritage of the area provides his vigorous and related to background to English-language readers for the 1st time. fantastically designed and freshly illustrated, it is a booklet to be savored and picked up.

In 40 concise chapters, Gombrich tells the tale of guy from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In among emerges a colourful photograph of wars and conquests, grand artistic endeavors, and the unfold and obstacles of technology. it is a textual content ruled now not by way of dates and evidence, yet through the sweep of mankind’s adventure around the centuries, a consultant to humanity’s achievements and an acute witness to its frailties.

The made from a beneficiant and humane sensibility, this undying account makes intelligible the total span of human background.

Show description

Read or Download A Little History of the World PDF

Best greek & roman books

Categories. On Interpretation. Prior Analytics

Aristotle, nice Greek thinker, researcher, reasoner, and author, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, used to be the son of Nicomachus, a doctor, and Phaestis. He studied less than Plato at Athens and taught there (367–47); hence he spent 3 years on the courtroom of a former student, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at the moment married Pythias, one in every of Hermeias’s kin.

The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary

In the back of the superficial obscurity of what fragments we've got of Heraclitus' proposal, Professor Kahn claims that it's attainable to observe a scientific view of human life, a thought of language which sees ambiguity as a tool for the expression of a number of that means, and a imaginative and prescient of human lifestyles and demise in the greater order of nature.

L’aporie ou l’expérience des limites de la pensée dans le Péri Archôn de Damaskios

The unconventional aporetism of the treatise on first rules written via the Neoplatonic thinker Damascius will be understood as a distinct method of comprehend, in several methods and on an exceptionally excessive and summary point, not just those rules but in addition ourselves as thinkers. within the quest to understand final fact, this treatise is additionally a deep mirrored image at the procedures and barriers of human suggestion when it comes to splendid ideas.

Philoponus: On Aristotle on the Soul 1.1-2

Till the release of this sequence over ten years in the past, the 15,000 volumes of the traditional Greek commentators on Aristotle, written more often than not among 2 hundred and six hundred advert, constituted the most important corpus of extant Greek philosophical writings now not translated into English or different ecu languages. Over 30 volumes have now seemed within the sequence, that is deliberate in a few 60 volumes altogether.

Extra info for A Little History of the World

Example text

And they took just as much care as they did with their corpses, when they preserved them from rotting away, in preserving all their ancient traditions over the centuries. Their priests made quite sure that no son did anything his father had not done before him. To them, everything old was sacred. Only rarely in the course of all that time did people turn against this strict conformity. Once was shortly after the reign of King Cheops, about 2100 , when the people tried to change everything. ’ But it did not last long, and soon everything was as strict as before.

And so these tribes arrived, with their wives and their children. The Dorians pushed furthest, right down into the southernmost tip of Greece which looks like a maple leaf and is called the Peloponnese. There they subdued the inhabitants, and set them to work in the fields. They themselves founded a city where they lived, and called it Sparta. The Ionians who arrived after the Dorians found there was not enough room for them all in Greece. Many of them settled above the maple leaf, to the north of its stalk, on a peninsula called Attica.

Xerxes, who must have heard from his spies that the allies were set on leaving, fell for it. The next morning he attacked with his many small and nimble warships. And he lost. The Greek ships were larger and less easy to manoeuvre, but once again they were fighting desperately for their freedom. Not only that, but their victory ten years earlier at Marathon had inspired them with confidence. From a vantage point Xerxes was forced to look on while his smaller, lighter galleys were rammed and sunk by the Greeks’ heavy ships.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.38 of 5 – based on 48 votes