The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World

New. New Patrick Wyman holds a PhD in history from the University of Southern California He previously worked as a sports journalist, covering mixed martial arts and boxing from 2013 to 2018 His work has been featured in Deadspin, The Washington Post, Bleacher Report, and others He is currently host of the podcast, Tides of History, and previously the host of Fall of Rome

In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term

As told through the lives of ten real people-from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob Fugger to a ruthless small-time merchant and a one-armed mercenary captain-The Verge illustrates how their lives, and the times in which they lived, set the stage for an unprecedented globalized future

Over an intense forty-year period, the seeds for the so-called "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and the rest of the globe would be planted From Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic to Martin Luther's sparking the Protestant Reformation, the foundations of our own, recognizably modern world came into being

For the past 500 years, historians, economists, and the policy-oriented have argued which of these individual developments best explains the West's rise from backwater periphery to global dominance As The Verge presents it, however, the answer is far more nuanced