What We Are Reading Today: The Earth Transformed

Author: Peter Frankopan  In “The Earth Transformed,” Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history.  Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in 11th-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century.