Reveals how the voyages of Columbus reintroduced plants and animals that had been separated millions of years earlier, documenting how the ensuing exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas fostered a European rise.

"One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal," the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times, reviewing The World is Flat in 2005. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman brilliantly demystifies the new flat world for listeners, making sense of the advances in technology and communications

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Americans tend to assume that modern historiography has produced a full and complete understanding of slavery in the United States, as a shameful pre-modern institution, existing in isolation from America's later success. But while we have long since rejected the idealistic depiction of happy slaves and paternalistic masters, we have not yet begun to grapple with the full extent of slavery's horrors—or its link to the expansion of the country,

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This famous study - one of the most influential in the area of American economic history - brought a halt to Americans' uncritical reverence for their country's revolutionary past. Questioning the Founding Fathers' motivations in drafting the Constitution, it viewed the results as a product of economic self-interest. Perhaps the most controversial books of its time.

"How did the Economist increase revenues from subscriptions when Newsweek and Time were hemorrhaging? How did Tencent create a cash machine from largely free and virtual products in a market with a GDP per capita ten times lower than the U.S.? And in the midst of an industry revolution, how are we to understand these and other media organizations, their fates, and their markets? Combining insightful analysis with an accessible, humorous tone, Harvard...