Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies is a modern classic attempting to analyze why European and Asian civilizations have been able to dominate other world cultures. Although more of an anthropological study than pure history, major events and cultures in the book are explained within an historical context. Diamond points out that nearly all of humanity's achievements (scientific, artistic, architectural, political, etc.) have occurred on the Eurasian continent, while the native peoples of other continents (Africa and the Americas for instance) have been largely conquered, displaced, and in some extreme cases exterminated by Eurasian military and political advantages stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last Ice Age. He proposes explanations to account for such disproportionate and lopsided distributions of power and achievements in history focusing on mainly geographical factors accounting for, among other things, why Europeans had such superior military technology and were able to often devastate and conquered large native populations in Africa and the Americas.