Recently each issue of Academic Questions has had a central theme: the military and liberal education, racial preferences, the family and the liberal arts. This issue, by contrast, is more a gathering of threads. To what end? In Hesiod’s Theogony, Lachesis is the middle sister of the Three Fates. Clotho spins the threads of life; Atropos cuts them; but Lachesis measures them off in due proportion.
The first of our threads is global history. A year ago (Spring 2008, vol. 21, no.2) we published a review by Ricardo Duchesne of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s The World: A History. It was clear that Duchesne had much more to say about the emerging sub-discipline behind Armesto’s book, and we offered him the space to do just that. His synthesis appears here as “The World without Us.”
It is an important article, for
Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.