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I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant t...more

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(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tu...more

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Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Som...more

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For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti ...more

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Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-te...more

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...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

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History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

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Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

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The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created...more

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Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of health...more

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Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farmin...more

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Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced bi...more

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[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept t...more