The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact--political demographic ecological and psychological--of disease on cultures. A book of the first importance a truly revolutionary work. --The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish to the bubonic plague in China to the typhoid epidemic in Europe Plagues and Peoples is a brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement (Kirkus Reviews). Upon its original publication Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s another chapter was added to this chronicle of events which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. Thought-provoking well-researched and compulsively readable Plagues and Peoples is essential reading--that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly as intriguing as it is enlightening.