Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

  950,000 years ago a family of five walked along the beach and left their prints behind. Now, we can view that poignant portrait etched in time — fossils of footprints on the beach — and think of our own families and what memory we might leave in our wake. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these familiar footprints serve as an inspiration for his latest research in world history — one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In his book The World, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the families at the heart of the human drama. These families are diverse and span across space and time. Montefiore tells the stories of the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps,