The Lessons of History

In this collection, The Lessons of History references 2 other books and is cited by 15 other books.

It draws on The Origin of Species and The Republic.

It’s picked up by Leadership in Turbulent Times, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and 12 others.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

The Lessons of History is the rare slender volume that an extraordinary number of historians and social thinkers treat as a touchstone for understanding recurring patterns across civilizations. Isabel Wilkerson extends Durant's long-arc approach in both Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns, while Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads and Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography apply his dictum that geography is the matrix of history to contemporary geopolitics.

Christopher Clark tests Durant's maxim that war is the constant of history in The Sleepwalkers, and Adam Hochschild illustrates Durant's observation about the tension between freedom and power through the brutality of King Leopold's Congo. Readers praise the book for distilling five thousand years into fewer than a hundred pages of sharp, unsentimental observation -- it is one of the most efficient ways to gain a framework for thinking about why history rhymes.