History Worth Knowing

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01

Yuval Noah Harari

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Clarity is power. Use it well.

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02

Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

American Prometheus

The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance — these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.

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03

Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel

The more we know about human history, the more we learn that its winners were the people who were luckiest in the geography and animals they inherited.

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04

Steven Johnson

How We Got to Now

The best way to predict the future is to understand the past. Innovation is not about sudden breakthroughs—it's about seeing what's adjacent to what we already know.

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05

Anne Applebaum

Red Famine

Memory is the only form of immortality the poor have.

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06

Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens

We are not gods, and we are not beasts. We are something in between, and that in-betweenness is the source of both our power and our responsibility.

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07

John Green

The Anthropocene Reviewed

We cannot live only on Earth. We also live in the stories we tell ourselves about Earth. And I believe that we have a responsibility to tell good stories.

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08

Garrett M. Graff

The Only Plane in the Sky

To forget the dead is to kill them twice. History is the only immortality the poor have.

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09

John le Carré & Oleg Gordievsky · 1989

The Spy and the Traitor

Trust is the currency of espionage—and the most valuable commodity to betray.

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10

Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson · 2012

Why Nations Fail

Nations succeed not because they are chosen, but because they choose institutions that channel human ambition toward creating rather than extracting.