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A panoramic view of global history from the end of World War Two to the dawn of the new millennium, and a portrait of an age of unprecedented transformation. In this ambitious, groundbreaking, and sweeping work, Jonathan Sperber guides readers through six decades of global history, from the end of World War Two to the onset of the new millennium. As Sperber's immersive and propulsive book reveals, the defining quality of these decades involved the rising and unstoppable flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas across boundaries, continents, and oceans, creating prosperity in some parts of the world, destitution in others, increasing a sense of collective responsibility while also reinforcing nationalism and xenophobia. It was an age of transformation in every realm of human existence: from relations with nature to relations between and among nations, superpowers to emerging states; from the forms of production to the foundations of religious faith. These changes took place on an unprecedentedly global scale. The world both developed and contracted. Most of all, it became interconnected. To make sense of it, Sperber illuminates the central trends and crucial developments across a wide variety of topics, adopting a chronology that divides the era into three distinct periods: the postwar, from 1945 through 1966, which retained many elements of period of world wars; the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, when the pillars of the postwar world were undermined; and the two decades at the end of the millennium, when new structures were developed, structures that form the basis of today's world, even as the iconic World Trade Center was reduced by terrorism to rubble. The Age of Interconnection is a clear-eyed portrait of an age of blinding change.

Der Inselstaat Samoa, die »Perle der Südsee«, ruft Assoziationen vom »Mythos Südsee« und paradiesischen Inselwelten hervor. Dabei war die Inselgruppe im Südpazifik an der Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert ein hochpolitischer Schauplatz: Gleich drei Kolonialmächte erhoben Ansprüche auf die Inseln. Wie gestaltete sich in diesem Spannungsfeld der Diskurs in zeitgenössischen Reiseberichten? Welche Argumentationslinien zeichnen sich ab? Und welche Funktionen hatten diese? In ihrer historischen Diskursanalyse zieht Gabriele Förderer erstmals Reiseberichte deutscher, englischer und US-amerikanischer Akteur_innen heran und skizziert so ein differenziertes und hoch ambivalentes Bild der Darstellungen Samoas.

“An illuminating work of massive insight” on the complex ideas and events that initiated the historical shift between the 19th and 20th centuries (Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen). “An always-provocative view of an era that many people would just as soon forget... an absorbing tour of the 20th century.” —Kirkus Reviews In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, agriculture, and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change and postmodernism. In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives. Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much” in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he's discussing Einstein's theories of relativity, the Beat poets'interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.