Book excerpt: How will we be remembered? History is simply the interaction of our lives with each other and with nature. It begins with acts of adventure, courage, blind ambition, greed, and folly that are then recorded. Without accurate recording, we wouldn't know that Napoleon used a sandbox to construct his battle plans and transmitted messages to troops using semaphore, and that Christopher Columbus thought he'd landed in India instead of America - thus the name Indians for the local people there. Historical Atlas is a comprehensive history of the world to date. Learn everything from the gruesome detail of Nero's torture of Christians to the methods Kublai Khan used to select his concubines. Who did Marco Polo meet along the Silk Road and how did a lowly carpenter influence so much of the world's religion? The world as we know it is nothing more than the sum of Earth's history. Every event in time is influenced and guided by humankind and we cannot begin to know what might happen until we understand what has already occurred. Beginning with the origins of humankind and the migration of people around the globe, the Historical Atlas details the remarkable historical events that guide our future. Covering all of recorded time, this book moves effortlessly through the eons of our existence, cementing the path of our development, culture, and expectations. Historical Atlas presents hundreds of specially commissioned maps, detailed with symbols and icons that reveal a full and vivid image of the individual events of history. Each time period is divided into areas of the world so that overlapping events are contained within the boundaries of their geographic and chronological eras. The narrative is fresh and modern, revealing our history with zest and vigor. Each period is also illustrated with images that lure us into the era. Divided into chronological order and continents, the book is a cartographic narrative of humankind's time on Earth to the present.