'Extraordinary' Ai Weiwei It's been said that we're a more fearful society than ever before.
Yet fear and the panic it produces have long been driving forces - perhaps the driving force
- of world history: fear of God of famine war disease poverty and other people. In Fear:
An Alternative History of the World Robert Peckham considers the impact of fear in history
as both a coercive tool of power and as a catalyst for social change. Beginning with the Black
Death in the fourteenth century Peckham traces a shadow history of the world through fear
from the French Revolution and the social movements of the nineteenth century to modern market
crashes Cold War paranoia and the AIDS pandemic and into a digital culture increasingly
marked by uniquely twenty-first-century fears. What did fear mean to us in the past and how
can a better understanding of it equip us to face the future? Through the stories of the people
and the moments that changed history Peckham reveals how fear and panic made us who we are.
