by Dan Carlin
My extreme thanks to both of my editors: Luke Dempsey, who I so wanted to work with that he enticed me to HarperCollins and set the tone for the work, and Eric Nelson, who took over the project before publication and had to finish all that difficult heavy lifting that traditionally happens as a book nears publication. Lifting that I gladly would have helped more with were I my grandfather’s grandson. I am thankful for the both of them.
Finally, and I say this all the time but that’s because I think about it all the time, my thanks to the avid listeners of the podcasts we do. You have supported us, promoted us, encouraged us, and helped us mold the work into its current form. You have been doing this since 2005. Every day I realize how fortunate I am. Where on earth would we be without you?
Further Reading
Want to know more? Here are a few places you can start.
Chapter 1: Do Tough Times Make for Tougher People?
Delbrück, Hans. Warfare in Antiquity. Vol. 1 of History of the Art of War. Translated by Walter J. Renfroe Jr. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005.
Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization. 11 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935–1975.
Gavin, James M. War and Peace in the Space Age. New York: Harper, 1958.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. 1766–1788. Reprint ed. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2010.
Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey De Selincourt. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Hoover, Herbert. The Great Depression, 1929–1941. Vol. 3 of The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover. New York: Macmillan, 1952.
Starr, Chester G. A History of the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Steinbeck, John. “The Dubious Battle in California.” The Nation, September 12, 1936.
———. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939.
———. “The Harvest Gypsies.” 7 pts. San Francisco News, October 5–12, 1936.
Xenophon. Anabasis: The March Up Country. Translated by H. G. Dakyns. Independently published, 2017.
———. Cryopaedia: The Education of Cyrus. Translated by H. G. Dakyns. CreateSpace, 2012.
Also: Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, story and screenplay by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, Twentieth Century Fox, 1974.
Chapter 2: Suffer the Children
Delbrück, Hans. History of the Art of War. 4 vols. Translated by Walter J. Renfroe Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975–1990.
deMause, Lloyd. The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Other Press, 2002.
———, ed. The History of Childhood. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974.
Shahar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 1990.
Chapter 3: The End of the World as They Knew It
Arnold, John H. History: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Drews, Robert. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. Reissue ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
———. The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 BC. 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Fischer, Peter M., and Teresa Bürge, eds. “Sea Peoples” Up-to-Date: New Research on Transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th–11th Centuries BCE. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2014.
Givas, Nick, “Rubio Leads Bipartisan Backlash After De Blasio Quotes Castro Ally Che Guevara,” Fox News, June 27, 2019. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/de-blasio-apologizes-for-che-guevara-quote-seiu.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Caroline Alexander. New York: Ecco, 2015.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.
Knapp, Bernard A., and Sturt W. Manning. “Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean.” American Journal of Archaeology 120, no. 1 (January 2016): 99–149.
Liverani, Mario. The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Pickworth, Diana. “Excavations at Nineveh: The Halzi Gate” in Iraq 67, no. 1, Nineveh. Papers of the 49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part Two (Spring 2005), pp. 295–316. British Institute for the Study of Iraq, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4200584.
Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford, UK: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.
Robbins, Manuel. Collapse of the Bronze Age: The Story of Greece, Troy, Israel, Egypt, and the Peoples of the Sea. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2001.
Shaw, Garry J. War & Trade with the Pharaohs: An Archaeological Study of Ancient Egypt’s Foreign Relations. Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Archaeology, 2017.
Starr, Chester G. A History of the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Tainter, Joseph. Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Van De Mieroop, Marc. A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 BC. 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Wiener, Malcolm H. “Causes of Complex Systems Collapse at the End of the Bronze Age,” in “Sea Peoples” Up-to-Date: New Research on Transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th–11th Centuries BCE, edited by Peter M. Fischer and Teresa Bürge. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2014.
Also: Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, story by Pierre Boulle, screenplay by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, Twentieth Century Fox, 1968.
Chapter 4: Judgment at Nineveh
Durant, Will. Our Oriental Heritage. Vol. 1 of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935.
Farrokh, Kaveh. Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War. Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2007.
Ferrill, Arther. The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Frahm, Eckart. A Companion to Assyria (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
Gavaghan, Paul F. The Cutting Edge: Military History of Antiquity and Early Feudal Times. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
Healy, Mark. The Ancient Assyrian. Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 1992.
Olmstead, A. T. History of Assyria. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923.
Roux, Georges. Ancient Iraq. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Saggs, H. W. F. Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria. New York: Putnam, 1967.
Xenophon. The Persian Expedition. Translated by Rex Warner. New York: Penguin Classics, 1950.
Chapter 5: The Barbarian Life Cycle
Barbero, Alessandro. Charlemagne: Father of a Continent. Translated by Allan Cameron. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Collins, Roger. Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000. 3rd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Delbrück, Hans. The Barbarian Invasions. Vol. 2 of History of the Art of War. Translated by Walter J. Renfroe Jr. Rev. ed. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Dennis, George T., trans. Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Durant, Will. The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization—Christian, Islamic, and Judaic—from Constantine to Dante, AD 325–1300. Vol. 4 of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950.
———. Caesar and Christ. Vol. 3 of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944.
Einhard. The Life of Charlemagne. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.
Fell, Christine E., and David M. Wilson, eds. Northern World: The History and Heritage of Northern Europe. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987.
Ferrill, Arther. Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation. London: Thames & Hudson, 1986.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Ro
man Empire. 6 vols. 1766–1788. Reprint ed. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2010.
Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin, 1974.
Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
James, Edward. The Franks. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Lendon, J. E. Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Riche, Pierre. Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne. Translated by Jo Ann McNamara. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.
Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.
Tacitus. Agricola and Germania. New York: Penguin Classics, 2010.
Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Wells, Peter S. Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.
Wickham, Chris. The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000. New York: Viking, 2009.
Williams, Hywel. Emperor of the West: Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire. Reprint ed. London: Quercus, 2011.
Chapter 6: A Pandemic Prologue?
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.
Bostrom, Nick, and Milan M. Ćirković, eds. Global Catastrophic Risks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Docherty, Campbell, and Caroline Foulkes. “Toxic Shock.” Birmingham Post (UK), October 4, 2003.
Durant, Will. The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization—Christian, Islamic, and Judaic—from Constantine to Dante, AD 325–1300. Vol. 4 of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950.
Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Littman, Robert J. “The Plague of Athens: Epidemiology and Paleopathology.” Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine 76, no. 5 (October 2009): 456–67.
McCullough, David. “There Isn’t Any Such Thing as the Past.” Interview with Roger Mudd in American Heritage Presents Great Minds of History 50, no. 1 (February/March 1999).
McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
Orent, Wendy. Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease. New York: Free Press, 2004.
Rosen, William. Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007.
Sebelius, Kathleen. “Why We Still Need Smallpox.” New York Times, April 25, 2011.
Svensen, Henrik. The End Is Nigh: A History of Natural Disasters. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.
Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Touchstone ed. New York: Free Press, 1998.
Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
Chapter 7: The Quick and the Dead
For more information about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War, see the Atomic Heritage Foundation website: https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/little-boy-and-fat-man.
Baruch, Bernard. Speech before the first session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Hunter College, New York, June 14, 1946.
Blight, James G., and Janet M. Lang. The Armageddon Letters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
Bobbitt, Philip. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Bostrom, Nick, and Milan M. Ćirković, eds. Global Catastrophic Risks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Bradley, John. World War III: Strategies, Tactics and Weapons. New York: Crescent, 1982.
Brands, H. W. What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Cameron, Rob. “Police Close Case on 1948 Death of Jan Masaryk—Murder, Not Suicide.” Radio Praha Broadcast Archive, June 1, 2004. https://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/police-close-case-on-1948-death-of-jan-masaryk-murder-not-suicide.
Cirincione, Joseph. Bomb Scare: The History & Future of Nuclear Weapons. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Codevilla, Angelo, and Paul Seasbury. War: Ends and Means. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006.
Compton, Arthur Holly. Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative. 1956.
Crane, Conrad C. American Airpower Strategy in World War II: Bombs, Cities, Civilians, and Oil. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2016.
Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. New York: Little, Brown, 2003.
Dobbs, Michael. One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
Donovan, Hedley. Roosevelt to Reagan: A Reporter’s Encounters with Nine Presidents. New York: HarperCollins, 1985.
Dunnigan, James F. How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare in the 21st Century. 4th ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.
Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Lessons of History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.
Dyer, Gwynne. War: The Lethal Custom. Reading, UK: Periscope, 2017.
Eden, Lynn. Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge and Nuclear Weapons Devastation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Einstein, Albert. Letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, August 2, 1939. Available via the Atomic Heritage Foundation, https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/einstein-szilard-letter.
“Fissile Material Basics.” Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, 2019. https://ieer.org/resource/factsheets/fissile-material-basics/.
Forrestal, James. The Forrestal Diaries. Edited by Walter Millis. New York: Viking, 1951.
Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
———. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gavin, Francis J. Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age. Reprint ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.
Gray, Colin S. War, Peace and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Greene, Jack C., and Daniel J. Strom, compilers. Would the Insects Inherit the Earth? and Other Subjects of Concern to Those Who Worry About Nuclear War. Oxford UK: Pergamon Profession, 1988.
Hachiya, Michihiko. Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945 (Fifty Years Later). Translated by Warner Wells. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
Howard, Michael. The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Kahn, Herman. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
Kaku, Michio, and Daniel Axelrod. To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans. Boston: South End Press, 1999.
Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.
Kennedy, Paul, ed. Grad Strategies in War and Peace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
Kennett, Lee B. A History of Strategic Bombing: From the First Hot-Air Balloons to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New York: Scribner, 1982.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers. Translated by Strobe Talbott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
Kozak, Warren. LeMay: The Life and Wars of Gen
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Lilienthal, David E. The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950. Vol. 2 of The Journals of David E. Lilienthal. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Martel, William, and Paul L. Savage. Strategic Nuclear War: What the Superpowers Target and Why. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1986.
McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.
Poundstone, William. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Schlosser, Eric. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.
Sekimori, Gaynor, trans. Hibakusha: Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo: Kosei, 1989.
Sherry, Michael S. In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Shiotsuki, Masao. Doctor at Nagasaki: My First Assignment Was Mercy Killing. Tokyo: Kosei, 1989.
Southard, Susan. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. New York: Viking Penguin, 2015.
Stern, Sheldon. Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
———. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
———. The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Thomas, Evan. Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World. New York: Little, Brown, 2012.
US Congress. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Washington, DC: US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, 1959.
Van Creveld, Martin. Technology and War: From 2000 BC to the Present. New York: Free Press, 1991.