If someone had been able to go into orbit around the Earth a century ago, he or she would have seen the light from 16 concentrations of a million or more people. Today, the crew of the space shuttle can see 450 such shining cities on the globe -- the economic, governmental, cultural and technological power plants of an increasingly urban age.
It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that "history" has been, at root, the story of...
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