Libros de Historia Universal, página 5 de 1389

Gunpowder studies are still in their infancy despite the long-standing civil and military importance of this explosive since its discovery in China in the mid-ninth century AD. In this second volume by contributors who meet regularly at symposia of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), the research is again rooted in the investigation of the technology of explosives manufacture, but the fact that the chapters range in scope from the Old World to the New, from sources of raw materials in south-east Asia to the complications of manufacture in the West, shows that the story is more than the simple one of how an intriguing product was made. This volume is the first to develop the implications of the subject, not just in the sense of relating it to changing military technologies, but in that of seeing the securing of gunpowder supplies as fundamental to the power of the state and imperial pretensions.The search for saltpetre, for example, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, became a powerful engine of sea-going European trade from the early seventeenth century. Smaller states like Venice were unable to form these distant connections, and so to sustain a gunpowder army. Stronger states like France and Britain were able to do so, and became even more powerful as the demand for improved explosives fostered national strengths - leading to a development of the sciences, especially chemistry, in the former case, and of manufacturing techniques in the latter.

¿Es posible que Nerón no incendiara Roma? ¿O que Livia no planeara el asesinato de todos los herederos al trono e incluso de su propio esposo? ¿Acaso los romanos no vomitaban durante las comidas? La historia esta viva y cambia continuamente de mano en mano. Quien la escribe tiene el poder de viajar en el tiempo y cambiar el pasado, de alterarla interpretando lo sucedido desde su propio punto de vista. Asi, muchas veces ocurre que la historia que nos han contado no se corresponde exactamente con la realidad.En este libro se desvelan las fake news del mundo romano: los engaños, bulos y mentiras que nos han contado sobre la historia de la antigua Roma. Aquellos que han creado, a veces incluso sin querer, los propios historiadores, los que se han formado por culpa del espeso velo que cubre la historia con el paso del tiempo, los que han quedado inmortalizados en peliculas, series y novelas e incluso los que los propios romanos generaron sobre ellos mismos. Desde la propaganda politica de los emperadores, hasta la realidad sobre la gente corriente, olvidada en los bajos fondos de Roma, pasando por las mayores perjudicadas del mundo antiguo, las mujeres, que han sufrido el escarnio de una historia creada exclusivamente por y para los hombres. Todos ellos encontraran ahora la verdad de sus historias ocultas.

This volume covers the history of the Roman Empire from the accession of Septimius Severus in AD 193 to the death of Constantine in AD 337. This period was one of the most critical in the history of the Mediterranean world. It begins with the establishment of the Severan dynasty as a result of civil war. From AD 235 this period of relative stability was followed by half a century of short reigns of short-lived emperors and a number of military attacks on the eastern and northern frontiers of the empire. This was followed by the First Tetrarchy (AD 284305), a period of collegial rule in which Diocletian, with his colleague Maximian and two junior Caesars (Constantius and Galerius), restabilised the empire. The period ends with the reign of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, who defeated Licinius and established a dynasty which lasted for thirty-five years.

El 30 de abril de 2015 se celebran 70 años del suicidio de Hitler. Pero, ¿murió Hitler realmente en el búnker? Sus restos jamás se encontraron… Eric Frattini ha accedido a numerosos testimonios y do

From Al-Andalus to the Americas (13th-17th Centuries). Destruction and Construcion of Societies offers a multi-perspective view of the filiation of colonial and settler colonial experiences, from the Medieval Iberian Peninsula to the early modern Americas.

Nearly every aspect of daily life in the Mediterranean world and Europe during the florescence of the Greek and Roman cultures is relevant to the topics of engineering and technology. This volume highlights both the accomplishments of the ancient societies and the remaining research problems, and stimulates further progress in the history of ancient technology. The subject matter of the book is the technological framework of the Greek and Roman cultures from ca. 800 B.C. through ca. A.D. 500 in the circum-Mediterranean world and Northern Europe. Each chapter discusses a technology or family of technologies from an analytical rather than descriptive point of view, providing a critical summation of our present knowledge of the Greek and Roman accomplishments in the technology concerned and the evolution of their technical capabilities over the chronological period. Each presentation reviews the issues and recent contributions, and defines the capacities and accomplishments of the technology in the context of the society that used it, the available "technological shelf," and the resources consumed. These studies introduce and synthesize the results of excavation or specialized studies. The chapters are organized in sections progressing from sources (written and representational) to primary (e.g., mining, metallurgy, agriculture) and secondary (e.g., woodworking, glass production, food preparation, textile production and leather-working) production, to technologies of social organization and interaction (e.g., roads, bridges, ships, harbors, warfare and fortification), and finally to studies of general social issues (e.g., writing, timekeeping, measurement, scientific instruments, attitudes toward technology and innovation) and the relevance of ethnographic methods to the study of classical technology. The unrivalled breadth and depth of this volume make it the definitive reference work for students and academics across the spectrum of classical studies.

Si esto es un hombre, libro que inaugura la trilogía que Primo Levi dedicó a los campos de exterminio nazis, surgió en la imaginación de su autor durante los días de horror en Auschwitz, cuando la p

Para abarcar un panorama tan complejo, se requería alguien con la erudición y la sensibilidad de Eric Hobsbawm; alguien que, como él, vivió el siglo: que estuvo en Berlín cuando Hitler fue proclamado canciller y en Moscu despues de la muerte de Stalin; que conocio los movimientos revolucionarios de America Latina y convivio en Cambridge con Turing y tambien con los descubridores de la estructura del ADN. Este analiza el siglo como una trayectoria cerrada que comenzo en un tiempo de catastrofes (guerras mundiales, crisis economica, revoluciones y fascismo), experimento una edad de oro y ha acabado en un derrumbamiento. Lo hace con la franqueza de quien, tras la caida del comunismo, ha de explicarse sus propios errores, sin dejar de denunciar los defectos de un sistema que engendra desigualdad y pobreza en un mundo inestable, y con una mirada de una amplitud insolita, que no solo se detiene en los acontecimientos politicos y en la evolucion economica, sino que analiza las transformaciones sociales (la gran revolucion que ha cambiado las relaciones entre los sexos y las generaciones), los avances de la ciencia y la tecnologia, las mutaciones del gran arte y la formacion de una nueva cultura juvenil. Habla tanto de la batalla de Stalingrado como de la historia del cine, de los cambios en la vida cotidiana, la crisis de la familia, el desarrollo de la mecanica cuantica y el significado de la posmodernidad.