The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet

The Book of Firsts is an entertaining, enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations of the past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.

Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both fun and thought-provoking with his survey of the major “firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals, artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, and catastrophic events—of the last two thousand years. Who was the first to use gu...