Famine

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere....

In 1999, few people had thought to examine the effects of climate on civilization. Now, due in part to the groundbreaking work of archaeologist Brian Fagan, climate change is a central issue....

The word "holodomor" derives from a combination of two Ukrainian words: holod (hunger) and mor (extermination). This term is used to describe one of the least-known events of state-sponsored mass starvation: the Great Famine of Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933....

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century....

From colonization to the space race, this is the story of America’s successes and failures. Learn how a little settlement of a few hundred colonists grew to be one of the most powerful nations in the world....

In their long history of suffering, nothing was ever so terrible as what the Irish endured during the Great Potato Famine that struck the country in the 1840s....

Keep her inside. Keep her alive. Blake Suttone has a stomach full of grief and no food. A decade of famine has taken its toll on the splintered kingdom, but it is the merchants who suffer most. A wall stands between the hungry and the food....

The British Empire comprised a bewildering collection of colonies, dominions, protectorates, and mandated possessions that spanned the planet....

Jailed as a scapegoat for Stalin's famines, Vavilov had traveled over five continents, collected hundreds of thousands of seeds in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity...

There are a thousand books out there that will tell you "how" to prepare for collapse - but this is the ONLY book that will tell you "what" to ...

Dikötter shows the disaster that engulfed China between 1958 and 1962 was much worse than previously thought, with a death toll of at least 45 million....

Human history mirrors the history of climate change. Human origins, for example, can be traced to five million years ago when the climate of East Africa became progressively hotter and drier. This caused the lush tropical jungles to disappear and be replaced by arid plains and savannahs....

In 1975, at the age of 20, Hannah Coady thinks she can change the world....

A significant contribution to how the British empire left the richest Indian province in tatters as Fazle Chowdhury makes a sharp rebuttal to the ...

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications....

Mao Zedong was a Marxist revolutionary wishing to overthrow regimes he viewed as imperialist, and yet Mao, often referred to as the Red Emperor, behaved much like totalitarian emperors of China’s medieval past....

An inspirational memoir tracing Lester Brown’s life from a small-farm childhood to leadership as a global environmental activist....

When famine strikes, it tests more than just your survival skills—it challenges your ability to thrive. "Thriving in the Time of Famine: ...

For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide.....

Thought-provoking and important, this is essential listening for historians, economists, demographers, and anyone else who is interested in the history and possible future of famine....