Author: Anne Trumbore

From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short.

Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in “The Teacher in the Machine,” the promises of today’s cutting-edge technologies aren’t new. Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education.

It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history —obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction.

In “What Is Ancient History?” Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history — a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today.

For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today’s ways of life were created and spread — from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. 

Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably.