Sailing from Byzantium

A Nickel Tour of Byzantium
A layperson's overview of Byzantium and Byzantine history for those who enjoyed my book, Sailing from Byzantium.

Favorite sites

Contact Colin Wells
Titles available at amazon:
NEW! A Brief History of History

Sailing from Byzantium

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Saudi Arabia

Stick Like Glue

The Mystery of Socrates'
Last Words
The death of Socrates is a cultural icon that lies at the heart of Western civilization. But his mysterious last words have kept us from fully understanding its meaning. My explanation of them is simple, even obvious, and has been hiding in plain sight for 2,400 years. It was published recently in Arion, Boston University's journal of classics and the humanities.

The Longest War: The Epic Clash of Faith and Reason, from Abraham to Zygotes
If you've read my other books, you know that the historical relationship between faith and reason is a central interest of mine. Here's a link to my current project, a book that tells that story from the beginning.

Joseph Needham's Big Question The New York Review of Books (December 18, 2008)
Here's a link to a letter I wrote recently that was published in The New York Review of Books on the question "Why Didn't Science Rise in China?

Reviews by Colin Wells:
Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren's Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State (Prometheus, 2003)
This might interest you if you have been following the current debate over Islam.

Kathryn Ringrose's The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (U of Chicago, 2003)
This might interest you if you follow gender studies, or if you are into Byzantine history and culture.

Opinions:
Impeachment Is Not About Iraq
Here's an opinion piece I wrote for my local paper, The Plattsburgh Press-Republican, calling for the impeachment of President Bush. All elected officials swear an oath to support the Constitution, and the president has systematically attacked the Constitution. I argue here that any public official who does not support impeachment has failed to honor his or her oath of office.

A Brief History of History
Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past

The Lyons Press
$27.95 hardcover (352p)
ISBN 978-1-59921-122-0

What Daniel Boorstin did for science in The Discoverers, Colin Wells now does for history in A Brief History of History. An accessible and lively biography of history as a living idea, this book brings together evocative sketches of the great historians with concise summaries of their most important works. Moving forward through the ages, Wells shows us how such brilliant minds have changed our understanding of history, how history itself moved forward over time as a way of approaching the past, and why "history" is a startlingly fluid concept, with an evolutionary course--a story--all its own.

History is the turf on which we fight our culture wars. Given its humble origins as a minor literary genre in ancient Greece, the study of history stands today as perhaps the most successful monument to the global spread of Western civilization, rivaling even science in its ubiquity. Yet it did not have to turn out that way. While tracing the evolution of history, Wells shows how this branch of knowledge has at times been rejected and scorned by those who questioned its very legitimacy.

Wells begins by arguing that history has two "parents" in the ancient Greek world, epic poetry and science, and that its first two practitioners, Herodotus and Thucydides, each took after one of those parents respectively. This dichotomy serves as a backdrop for the larger narrative that follows, in which "the scientist" dominates the writing of history until very recent times, when "the storyteller" makes a comeback.

A riveting blend of vibrant prose and penetrating insight, A Brief History of History is a must for anyone interested in how we look at the past.