Everyone Knows This

This book will not teach you the codes of history, the location of El Dorado, the identity of Jack the Ripper, or the wisdom of the Philosopher's Stone. You will not encounter the Sixth Dalai Lama frequenting taverns, Diane de Poitiers drinking gold to stay young, the Venetian garrison responding to a call for surrender by putting their middle fingers between their index and ring fingers and waving them, the flirtatious transvestite Caterina Vizzani, who dressed as a man and seduced all of Siena, or the enemy falling on Evliya while he was relieving himself in a corner, turning him into a "poop-covered veteran."

This is not a book of heroes and villains, of visionaries who changed the course of history and short-sighted leaders who squandered opportunities. In our pages, where many concepts like the Little Ice Age, the Price and Industrial Revolutions, the Enlightenment, the Atlantic Triangle, the Great Divergence, Humanism, imagined communities, and the Protestant Ethic fly around, you will see continuities, not discontinuities. You will realize that events that suddenly changed history are actually the result of processes whose symptoms unfolded at a turtle's pace.

We aim for more than a slight smile created by the interesting characters of this grotesque historical cortege, underestimated by everyone, and the surprise offered by extraordinary anecdotes: to enable the reader to better understand their past and present, to plan their future more effectively, and to help them lead a higher quality life by gaining intellectual depth.

Emrah Safa Gürkan's Bunu Herkes Bilir, which blends humor with intelligence, is a bedside book that anyone who dedicates time to learning for self-improvement, regardless of age, will enjoy reading...