San Antonio College Library

From the suspension bridge to the decimal system, China's contributions in engineering, medicine, maths, science, warfare, transportation and music helped inspire the West's agricultural and industrial revolutions. This title offers a look at the unparalleled achievements of ancient China later adopted by the West.

The present volume provides a good introduction to Needham's work in much shorter scope than his monumental "science and civilization in China". It comprises lectures and addresses given between 1948 and 1966.

Publisher description: Geoffrey Lloyd engages in a wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn from the study of ancient civilizations that is relevant to fundamental problems, both intellectual and moral, that we still face today. These include, in philosophy of science, the question of the incommensurability of paradigms, the debate between realism and relativism or constructivism, and between correspondence and coherence conceptions of truth....

China is the world's biggest polluter -- and now one of its largest producers of clean energy. Which way will China go in the future, and how will it affect the global environment? Data scientist Angel Hsu describes how the most populous country on earth is creating a future based on alternative energy -- and facing up to the environmental catastrophe it created as it rapidly industrialized.

This program seeks to understand how the Chinese government, arguably the world's most elaborate and long-lived bureaucracy, has managed to balance the tension between controlling its people and keeping them contented enough to sustain national stability. Events unfolding at the village level in Sichuan Province demonstrate the dynamics of an evolving system of rule modeled on Marxism and informed by the legacies of Qin Shihuangdi and Confucius. Can...

Michael Wood has traveled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years. After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned to center stage as a global superpower and the world's second largest economy. But how did it become so dominant?...

"This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, one of the world's major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia's deserts, the...