\u201cThroughout history, rulers of humankind narrowly defined the world\u2019s center to be their own corner of the world,\u201d writes Stoffer. From the Babylonians and Romans to the Zhou dynasty and the Aztecs, imperial civilizations have made dramatic claims about their importance and exceptionalism. In this work, Stoffer argues that our history is more accurately defined by the \u201cunifying forces\u201d that bond humans, not only across geographic space, but also across thousands of years. The book\u2019s opening chapter focuses on humanity\u2019s unique ability to communicate via language and the written word. The author surveys linguistic commonalities found throughout myriad human civilizations and charts the visual connections between ancient cuneiform writing and 21st-century logos and symbolic pictographs. Other chapters analyze similar threads that unite humans across time and space, including the use of money and the creation of laws and universal commandments. Later portions explore the ways in which trade, transportation, and telecommunications have further united humans throughout history. The author also discusses religion; while religious division has been a characteristic of human history for thousands of years, Stoffer reframes the narrative by focusing on the shared elements found throughout most of the world\u2019s faiths, past and present, including grandiose architecture that points to the heavens, calendars centered around key events, and pilgrimage traditions. The author\u2019s interdisciplinary background\u2014he\u2019s served as a behavioral science professor, a U.S. Navy psychologist, and a lay minister\u2014is well suited for this reevaluation of human history, with Stoffer intriguingly blending his historical analysis with psychological observations about the human mind. While not all readers may be convinced by his optimistic conclusion that \u201chumankind continues a trajectory of unification,\u201d this engagingly written work offers much food for thought.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThroughout history, rulers of humankind narrowly defined the world\u2019s center to be their own corner of the world,\u201d writes Stoffer. From the Babylonians and Romans to the Zhou dynasty and the Aztecs, imperial civilizations have made dramatic claims about their importance and exceptionalism. In this work, Stoffer argues that our history is more accurately defined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7746"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}