The Rise And Fall of

A New York Times bestselling historian examines how demagoguery and the populism it inspires—for good and ill—is embedded in the very soul of our nation.

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance.

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried to use it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra, and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos.

This book analyzes the dynamics through which the two major communist parties of the capitalist world—which in the 1970s had great influence on their respective national political contexts since the 1980s are increasing their marginality and, although in different forms and with different timeframes are unable to stem the decline of their political and cultural influences on the working classes.

A new history of Assyria, the ancient civilization that set the model for future empires

This book explains why Venezuela is so rich in natural resources—it has been producing oil since 1922 and harbors the largest oil reserves in the world—and yet it is also a failed nation of class-divided citizens exhibiting deep poverty in a corrupt, incompetent state. Venezuela is a bipolar nation, where two marked poles in the society exist which have historical origins and are mutually exclusive.