Philosophers, historians, and social scientists have proposed a multitude of different theories trying to explain the rise of huge complex human societies over the past few millennia. Was the primary driver the invention of agriculture, which seems to be the default explanation held b

Earlier this year I was asked to serve on a Cultural Evolution Society committee tasked with developing a strategy for the Society’s publications. The most important issue is whether the Society should publish its own academic journal, and if yes, how. Generally speaking launching a j

It’s been a long haul. Six years ago we launched the project that we eventually named Seshat: Global History Databank. Three years ago, following a series of workshops that designed the overall structure of the databank, we started collecting data. By January 2015 we had 30,000 record

A senior colleague from my ecology days wrote to me with a request for a PDF reprint of an article I published in 1991. The article came out in Ecology, the flagship journal of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). When I published it, Ecology was an independent journal produced by

Many of you will remember the post I published in November on why there is no e-book version of the Ages of Discord (AoD). In that post I wrote I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about whether there is an e-book version of Ages of Discord (AoD); and if not, when there will be one. I

I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about whether there is an e-book version of Ages of Discord (AoD); and if not, when there will be one. I am sorry to report that currently I have no plans to publish AoD on Kindle or another e-book platform. The reason is that AoD, unlike Ultrasoci

Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (AoD) was published on September 30 and is available for purchase through Amazon.com. AoD is a scholarly book – in fact, it’s a work of cliodynamics. This means that there are lots of equations, 25 data tables, and

As readers of this blog will remember, a month ago I announced the publication of my new book, Ages of Discord (see this post). Things got a little delayed because, as I was traveling in central Java, my computer suddenly died on me. On the plus side, I appreciated a vacation from the

It’s amazing how the landscape of book publishing has been transformed in the last ten (or even five) years. Not only it’s now possible for authors to reach readers directly, as I did with Ultrasociety, without the intermediaries of literary agents, publishers, and printers, but the r

In September of 2009 I wrote to a bunch of colleagues with a proposal: let’s launch a journal that specializes in mathematical history. The great majority responded very positively, and we published the first issue of the journal in December of 2010. We are now in the sixth year of th