Summary: How do we understand the past? Is history at its essence the sweep of nations and empires and the large impersonal social, economic and environmental forces that drive change? For historian Margaret MacMillan the past is more complicated than this. It is in the lives of individuals, great and small, and the human characteristics of leadership, curiosity and hubris, to name a few, that we find some of the most important insights into our shared humanity and the meaning of humankind's common past.
