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1492: The Year the World Began
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1492: The Year the World Began
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1492: The Year the World Began
Ebook436 pages8 hours

1492: The Year the World Began

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

1492: The Year the World Began is a look at one of the most fascinating years in world history, the year when many believe the modern world was born. Historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Millennium, covers such iconic figures as Christopher Columbus and Alexander Borgia and explores cultures as diverse as that of Spain, China, and Africa to tell the story of 1492, a momentous year whose lessons are still relevant today
LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateNov 3, 2009
ISBN9780061959097
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1492: The Year the World Began
Author

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Some of his recent publications include 1492: The Year Our World Began (2011), Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (2006) and The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction (2011).

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Rating: 3.724489861224489 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dr. F-A has a curious program in this book. He seeks to give us a picture, a snap-shot of a very fluid system, to wit, our understanding of the past, as we have drawn it from written, and archaeological evidence, but reveals in his Epilogue that he believes that history has no course. But the point of such a snap-shot approach is to draw parallels, especially as his chapter on the community of the Indian ocean. I found this information very valuable when relating it to the scale of European-Mediterranean commerce. He seems to have found patterns in his denial that such patterns can be found. We are also treated to a close study of the state of the mind, and of the technology of Christopher Columbus, and some information relating to the lapse in exploration by non-European societies in the generation preceding Columbus. The book, promising a unity of vision, seems disjoined, but has some interesting essays dealing with the effects of the Expulsion of the Jews from spain, a quick look at exploration of North Eastern Africa in the fifteenth century, and a rare look at the Russian expansion of the period. A book for reading and then examining in the light of more detailed study in the areas covered. The prose is lively.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Engaging high-speed overview of the world (well, the civilised bits, anyway) as it was in 1492, just as the Spanish reached the Americas and the Portuguese moved into the Indian Ocean. Very entertaining and informative.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Overview of the various exploratory and colonialistic movements happening around the world in the period when Columbus was sailing to the New World (though that was neither his intention nor his assumption). While I learned an awful lot from this book, I found it frankly rather disappointing. Part of it was the author's sytax; the book is peppered with sentences and phrases that often struck me as odd and sometimes incomprehensible.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An engrossing, highly readable survey of the state of the world in 1492, when Columbus's (or his overlooked lookout's) discovery of the Americas dramatically changed the global status quo. Fernandez-Armesto, a Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, writes with clarity and intellectual rigor (not always an easily managed combination), examining the international situation with the enthusiasm of an ideal explorer.At 321 pages, this book is deceptively lightweight, and minimally footnoted, but the author manages to pack an impressive amount of content between its covers. Over the course of ten chapters, subjects covered include, among others, the fortunes of Islam in Africa, the reign of Ivan III and his massive expansion of Russia, and the complex tensions between Confucian mandarins and the Buddhist-sympathizing Ming dynasty. Some of Fernandez-Armesto's most striking observations are only briefly treated in the text, but provide much room for further thought: for example, his speculation that a decline in the fortunes of the great empire of Mali, during the fifteenth century, may have directly influenced the concurrent decline in the status of black people, evinced in contemporary map illustrations, thus strengthening the justifications for the slave trade (itself already well underway) and constituting a dramatic turning-point in the history of race relations.Occasionally, the author's attempts to provide contemporary pop-culture parallels for historic reference points can feel slightly jarring, but this is rarely an issue and in any case is also a reflection of the book's appealing chattiness and immense enthusiasm for and engagement with its subject. Notwithstanding its light touch, however, this study provides a cogent and intensive analysis of why other parts of the world, for one reason or another, did not take over the Americas -- thus giving the lie to the inevitability of the "rise of the West" -- and what this take-over, five hundred odd years ago, means for the world today.