A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution―from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality―and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike―either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. In their major New York Times bestseller, The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow fundamentally challenge these assumptions and recast our understanding of human history. We will never again see the past in the same way.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, Graeber and Wengrow reveal how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

Destined to be a classic, The Dawn of Everything signals a paradigm shift, profoundly transforming our understanding of the human past and making space to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual and political range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and hopefulness.

This volume explores social practices of framing, building and enacting community in urban-rural relations across medieval Eurasia. Introducing fresh comparative perspectives on practices and visions of community, it offers a thorough source-based examination of medieval communal life in its sociocultural complexity and diversity in Central and Southeast Europe, South Arabia and Tibet. As multi-layered social phenomena, communities constantly formed, restructured and negotiated internal allegiances, while sharing a topographic living space and joint notions of belonging. The volume challenges disciplinary paradigms and proposes an interdisciplinary set of low-threshold categories and tools for cross-cultural comparison of urban and rural communities in the Global Middle Ages. Contributors are Maaike van Berkel, Hubert Feiglstorfer, Andre Gingrich, Karoly Goda, Elisabeth Gruber, Johann Heiss, Katerina Hornickova, Eirik Hovden, Christian Jahoda, Christiane Kalantari, Odile Kommer, Fabian Kummeler, Christina Lutter, Judit Majorossy, Ermanno Orlando, and Noha Sadek.

The newest generation of leaders was raised on a steady diet of popular culture artifacts mediated through technology, such as film, television and online gaming. As technology expands access to cultural production, popular culture continues to play an important role as an egalitarian vehicle for promoting ideological dissent and social change. The chapters in this book examine works and creators of popular culture ? from literature to film and music to digital culture ? in order to address the ways in which popular culture shapes and is shaped by leaders around the globe as they strive to change their social systems for the better. Now is an exceptional time to explore the synergy between leadership, popular culture and social change. With analyses that span time, genre and space, the book?s contributors investigate works of popular culture as objects of leadership that help us to both reinforce and question our understandings of who we are and how we want to reshape the world around us. This dynamic examination of leadership presents a useful model of analysis not only for scholars of leadership and popular culture but also for cultural historians and educators across the humanities. Contributors include: K.M.S. Bezio, V.K. Bratton, P.D. Catoira, H. Connell Schaaf, L. DelPrato, S.J. Erenrich, K. Ganesan, S. Guenther, E.M. Holowka, K. Klimek, M.A. Menaldo, N.O. Warner, K. Yost

Dispersal considers the period of change in Stratford, East London prior to the 2012 Olympic Games. It is both a visual record of a place that has transformed beyond recognition and a commentary on the impact of these changes. Though often represented as a post-industrial 'wasteland', this part of East London was a melting pot of over 200 trades and industries. Photographers Marion Davies and Debra Rapp documented 60 of these small businesses - from belt-making, zinc- galavanising, kebab-making and salmon smoking - before they were forced to move from the area in 2007. These unique photographs reveal the atmosphere and processes of the workplace alongside a short account of the personal histories of each business. While the photographs provide an impression of the site at the cusp of change, they also suggest a landscape shaped over time. How this landscape or urban 'edgeland' developed and evolved from the mid-19th century is explored by urban planning and architectural historian Juliet Davis. A series of maps from 2007 to 2015 analyse the patterns of dispersal of these businesses. The three authors have charted the progress, successes and failures of these large and small firms, re-photographing a selection in 2015. They show how this major urban redevelopment project has had a permanent and dramatic impact on the Lea Valley's industrial areas; and at the same time they have created a lasting record of this previously diverse and often unappreciated working environment.

During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, they possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue, Clayton J. Butler investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses on three Union regiments recruited from among the white residents of the Deep South-individuals who passed the highest bar of Unionism by enlisting in the United States Army to fight with the First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. Northerners and southerners alike thought a considerable amount about Deep South Unionism throughout the war, often projecting their hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled dissenters. For both, the significance of these Unionists hinged on the role they would play in the postwar future. To northerners, they represented the tangible nucleus of national loyalty within the rebelling states on which to build Reconstruction policies. To Confederates, they represented traitors to the political ideals of their would-be nation and, as the war went on, to the white race, making them at times a target for vicious reprisal. Unionists' wartime allegiance proved a touchstone during the political chaos and realignment of Reconstruction, a period when many of these veterans played a key role both as elected officials and as a pivotal voting bloc. In the end, white Unionists proved willing to ally with African Americans during the war to save the Union but unwilling to protect or advance Black civil rights afterward, revealing the character of Unionism during the era as a whole.