{"product_id":"the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity","title":"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity","description":"\u003cp\u003eINSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  A dramatically new understanding of human history  challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolutionfrom the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state  democracy  and inequalityand revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.  For generations  our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlikeeither free and equal innocents  or thuggish and warlike. Civilization  we are told  could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or  alternatively  by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today  including the origins of farming  property  cities  democracy  slavery  and civilization itself.  Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology  the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive whats really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers  what were they doing all that time? If agriculture  and cities  did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination  then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected  and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone  and more full of playful  hopeful possibilities  than we tend to assume.  The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom  new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range  animated by curiosity  moral vision  and a faith in the power of direct action.  Includes Black-and-White Illustrations\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44945365270581,"sku":"ByrdShop_0374157359","price":33.27,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780374157357.jpg?v=1769885564","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}