Peter Watson

In The Great Divide, acclaimed author and historian Peter Watson explores the development of humankind between the Old World and the New, and offers a groundbreaking new understanding of human history.By 15,000 BC, humans had migrated from northeastern Asia across the frozen Bering land bridge to the Americas. When the last Ice Agecame to an end, the Bering Strait refilled with water, dividing America from Eurasia. This division continued until Christopher Columbus voyaged to the New World in the fifteenth century.The Great Divide compares the development of humankind in the Old World and the New between 15,000 BC and AD 1,500. Combining the most up-to-date knowledge in archaeology, anthropology, geology, meteorology, cosmology, and mythology, Peter Watson's masterful study offers uniquely revealing insight into what it means to be human.

How the division of the Americas from the rest of the world affected human history.In 15,000 B.C. early humankind, who had evolved in Africa tens of thousands of years before and spread out to populate the Earth, arrived in Siberia, during the Ice Age. Because so much water was locked up at that time in the great ice sheets, several miles thick, the levels of the world's oceans were much lower than they are today, and early humans were able to walk across the Bering Strait, then a land bridge, without getting their feet wet and enter the Americas. Then, the Ice Age came to an end, the Bering Strait refilled with water and humans in the Americas were cut off from humans elsewhere in the world. This division - with two great populations on Earth, each oblivious of the other - continued until Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America just before 1500 A.D. This is the fascinating subject of THE GREAT DIVIDE, which compares and contrasts the development of humankind in the 'Old World' and the 'New' between 15,000 B.C. and 1500 A.D. This unprecedented comparison of early peoples means that, when these factors are taken together, they offer a uniquely revealing insight into what it means to be human.THE GREAT DIVIDE offers a masterly and totally original synthesis of archaeology, anthropology, geology, meteorology, cosmology and mythology, to give a new shape - and a new understanding - to human history.

A virtuoso tour through the cultural history of German ideas and influence, from 1750 to the present

Since the problems of race relations are worldwide, the international origins and perspectives of this excellent and timely book are especially advantageous. More research has been done in the United States than elsewhere on the psychology of race relations, so it is appropriate that a plurality of the chapters of this book are by American authors--a stellar group that includes leading contributors to our contemporary knowledge of the topic. Contributors from the English-speaking Commonwealth countries are next in number, followed by authors from the United Kingdom, where race-related issues have only recently become a salient concern of politics and social ethics. The editor has assigned topics to his carefully chosen author-experts not by country or region, but by matching the expertise of each author against a need for coherent analysis of the important aspects of aepsychology and race.'Psychology and Race is divided into two major parts. The first half of the book looks at the interracial situation itself. The first section concentrates on the majority or dominant group, and describes the development and measurement of racial awareness and prejudice and techniques for reducing prejudice; the second section focuses on the reactions of subordinate or minority groups; and the third deals with specific aspects of interpersonal interaction-attitudes, behavior, and performance--when the people concerned are of different races. The book also looks at those areas of life where race is relevant and where psychology can help in an understanding of the situation.The scope of this volume, the distinction of its authors, and the hardheaded sense of reality it brings to the discussion of these extremely complex issues will make it an invaluable resource not only for teachers and students but also for everyone concerned in any way with this most pressing issue of our times.

The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli ,tomb raiders, who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers who spirit them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums. Peter Watson, a former investigative journalist for the London Sunday Times and author of two previous exposés of art world scandals, names the key figures in this network that has depleted Europe's classical artifacts. Among the loot are the irreplaceable and highly collectable vases of Euphronius, the equivalent in their field of the sculpture of Bernini or the painting of Michelangelo. The narrative leads to the doors of some major institutions: Sothebys, the Getty Museum in L.A., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York among them. Filled with great characters and human drama, The Medici Conspiracy authoritatively exposes another shameful round in one of the oldest games in the world: theft, smuggling and duplicitous dealing, all in the name of art.

A highly ambitious and lucid history of ideas from the very earliest times to the present day.'A masterpiece' NEW STATESMAN'An extraordinary new book ... This is the history of "ideas" as it has never presented before' SUNDAY TELEGRAPHIn this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world. The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earliest ideas might have originated. Looking at animal behaviour that appears to require some thought: tool-making, territoriality, counting, language (or at least sounds), pairbonding. Peter Watson moves on to the apeman and the development of simple ideas such as cooking, the earliest language, the emergence of family life. All the obvious areas are tackled: the Ancient Greeks, Christian theology, the ideas of Jesus, astrological thought, the soul, the self, beliefs about the heavens, the ideas of Islam, the Crusades, humanism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg and the book, the scientific revolution, the age of discovery, Shakespeare, the idea of Revolution, the Romantic imagination, Darwin, imperialism, modernism, Freud right up to the present day and the internet.

From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.

A history of the twentieth century which covers all the ideas, people, great events, literary and artistic movements, scientific discoveries which have shaped the twentieth century. 'Breathtakingly entertaining, endlessly instructive, irresistibly enjoyable' THE TIMES

Peter Watson tells the story of his five year investigation into Sotheby's and his discovery of practices that include the facilitation of smuggling, the sale of antiquities known to have been stolen from tombs, and the rigging of the Art Index Market.