“Throughout history, rulers of humankind narrowly defined the world’s center to be their own corner of the world,” writes Stoffer. From the Babylonians and Romans to the Zhou dynasty and the Aztecs, imperial civilizations have made dramatic claims about their importance and exceptionalism. In this work, Stoffer argues that our history is more accurately defined by the “unifying forces” that bond humans, not only across geographic space, but also across thousands of years. The book’s opening chapter focuses on humanity’s unique ability to communicate via language and the written word. The author surveys linguistic commonalities found throughout myriad human civilizations and charts the visual connections between ancient cuneiform writing and 21st-century logos and symbolic pictographs. Other chapters analyze similar threads that unite humans across time and space, including the use of money and the creation of laws and universal commandments. Later portions explore the ways in which trade, transportation, and telecommunications have further united humans throughout history. The author also discusses religion; while religious division has been a characteristic of human history for thousands of years, Stoffer reframes the narrative by focusing on the shared elements found throughout most of the world’s faiths, past and present, including grandiose architecture that points to the heavens, calendars centered around key events, and pilgrimage traditions. The author’s interdisciplinary background—he’s served as a behavioral science professor, a U.S. Navy psychologist, and a lay minister—is well suited for this reevaluation of human history, with Stoffer intriguingly blending his historical analysis with psychological observations about the human mind. While not all readers may be convinced by his optimistic conclusion that “humankind continues a trajectory of unification,” this engagingly written work offers much food for thought.