“visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant,… — Charles C. Mann Doing things Copy Share Image
“Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot… — Charles C. Mann Environmental problems Copy Share Image
Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out… — Charles C. Mann Drinking water Copy Share Image
There are serious worries about unconventional gas and oil, especially those concerning the environment. — Charles C. Mann Environment Copy Share Image
“It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.” — Charles C. Mann Life Copy Share Image
“the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such… — Charles C. Mann Art Copy Share Image
“The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos,… — Charles C. Mann Business Copy Share Image
“mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations” — Charles C. Mann War Copy Share Image
“Farmers learned to plant fallow fields with clover, which recharges the soil with nutrients.” — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth… — Charles C. Mann Books Copy Share Image
Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this… — Charles C. Mann Cases Copy Share Image
“In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. “Aaron Pomham… — Charles C. Mann John adams Copy Share Image
A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on… — Charles C. Mann Asian Copy Share Image
Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects… — Charles C. Mann Alarm clock Copy Share Image
“The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and… — Charles C. Mann Environment Copy Share Image
“The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on… — Charles C. Mann Success Copy Share Image
The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end. — Charles C. Mann Believe Copy Share Image
Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101… — Charles C. Mann Buyers Copy Share Image
“Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty… — Charles C. Mann Free people Copy Share Image
You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen?… — Charles C. Mann How Copy Share Image
A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to… — Charles C. Mann Body Copy Share Image
Some Western states have collaborative water agreements with Indian tribes - Washington state, for instance, monitors a number of its rivers to… — Charles C. Mann Indian Copy Share Image
“Because they did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left… — Charles C. Mann Trees Copy Share Image
