Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail
I mostly study 500 C.E. to the present.Deep History begins C. 2.5 million years ago. A useful corrective to our temporal provincialism. It’s a book that has radically reoriented how I think about history. It is a perfect complement to Robert Bellah’s most recent book, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. A magisterial uniting the most recent work on paleo-evolution with authors no longer much cited, such as Suzanne Langer. I’m not sure his larger argument is right, but it is a richly rewarding work to chew through, a little at a time.