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Signet Classics has published a revision of Robert B. Downs Books that Changed the World, originally published by The American Library Association. Perhaps it would have been more appropriately named Books In Science and the Social Sciences That Changed the World. Downs indicates that for practical reasons he omitted books from the fields of religion, philosophy, and literature. While acknowledging the importance of these fields, he found it necessary to exclude them because of the “insuperable obstacle” it would have been to come up with a list if those were included.

So the list that follows represents those books from the fields of science and the social sciences which he believes have had “profound influence on history, economics, culture, civilization, and scientific thought, from, roughly the Renaissance down to the mid-twentieth century….[books] that have had a great and continuing impact on human thought and action, not for a single nation, but for a major segment of the world.”

1. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
2. Common Sense, by Thomas Paine
3. Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
4. Essay on the Principle of Population, by Thomas Malthus
5. Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
6. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
7. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
8. The Influence Of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783, by Alfred T. Mahan
9. The Geographical Pivot of History, by Sir Halford J. Mackinder
10. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler
11. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, by Nicolaus Copernicus
12. De Motu Cordis, by William Harvey
13. Principia Mathematica, by Sir Isaac Newton
14. Origin of the Species, by Charles Darwin
15. The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud
16. Relativity, The Special and General Theories, by Albert Einstein

Downs notes that had he included books from the fields of religion and philosophy he would have no doubt included
- The Bible (King James and Douay versions)
- The Talmud
- The Koran
- The sacred Buddhist and Hindu writings
- Confucius
- The Greek philosophers
- St. Augustine
- St. Thomas Aquinas
- Martin Luther
- Immanuel Kant
- Science and Health, by Mary Baker Eddy
- The Book of Morman, by Joseph Smith

He indicates that finalists on his unproduced list of literary works would be such names as:
- The Greek and Roman classical writers
- Dante
- Chaucer
- Rabelais
- Cervantes
- Moliere
- Shakespeare
- Milton
- Goethe
- Heine
- Dostoevsky

And, among travel narratives:
- The travel narratives of Marco Polo
- Christopher Columbus letter of 1493
- Letters of Amerigo Vespucci
- Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffliques and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard Hakluyt
- Pilgrimes, by Samuel Purchas’
- Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
- One World, by Wendell Willkie

Downs’ list is not intended to be a list of “best books” or “great books”, but a list of influential books. As such it is helpful for the historian to think about why these books were so impactful.

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