“A wondrous tale of American Judaism” from the Colonial Era to the twentieth****century, by the acclaimed author of Jews, God, and History**(Kirkus Reviews).** Beginning with the Sephardim who first reached the shores of America in the 1600s, this fascinating book by historian Max Dimont traces the journey of the Je...

A Sociology of Awkwardness shows how awkward feelings are the outcome of social interactions going wrong. Combing insights from cultural sociology and the sociologies of interactions and emotions, this book develops the first comprehensive sociology of awkwardness. It provides an understanding of how people define, ...

The Mau Mau Rebellion took place in Kenya, beginning in 1952. A group of native Kenyan peoples, mostly from the Kikuyu tribe, rose up against their British colonizers, who had held the region since 1895. With a complicated story, it can be difficult to place the Mau Mau Uprising within the larger history of Kenyan n...

What does it mean to be cast outーnot just from society, but from your own conscience? In An Outcast of the Islands, Joseph Conrad explores the moral descent of Peter Willems, a corrupt European trader who flees to a remote Southeast Asian village after being disgraced. There, he finds a fragile peaceーuntil lust, a...

Unquestionably the best American fighter of World War 2, the North American P-51 Mustang served in large numbers with the USAAF's Eighth Air Force from late 1943 until VE Day, and was the mount of most aces in-theatre. Charged with the responsibility of escorting huge formations of B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Libe...

A fascinating analysis of the evolution of religion from the internationally renowned evolutionary psychologist When did humans develop spiritual thought? What is religion's evolutionary purpose? And in our increasingly secular world, why has it endured? Every society in the history of humanity has lived with religi...

Interweaving social, political, environmental, economic, and popular history, John Alexander Williams chronicles four and a half centuries of the Appalachian past. Along the way, he explores Appalachia's long-contested boundaries and the numerous, often contradictory images that have shaped perceptions of the region...

This volume examines the higher-level discussions convened at Wilton Park, the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office’s policy forum, since its inception in 1946. Originally a ‘re-education’ camp after World War II in the principles and practice of democracy, Wilton Park has evolved into a first-class inte...

Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological o...

When historians discuss the great European empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sweden is sometimes not included in their conversations. Despite this omission, Sweden amassed a wealthy, prosperous empire during these years. Their territory spanned several regions of Europe and even included colonies ...

The original international woman of mystery, Mata Hari is maligned as a spy and a traitor. Having seduced a number of the most powerful men in Europe, she was accused of spying for both Allied and Central Powers during the First World War. Mata Hari's biography tells a different story. From her remarkable transforma...

The Zapotecs formed one of the most important of the pre-Columbian civilizations. For one thousand years, their main city of Monte Albán was one of the largest and most sophisticated in Mesoamerica. Building this city was an astonishing engineering featーit involved flattening a hill in the center of the Oaxaca Vall...

在共產黨史觀、國民黨史觀與台獨史觀外， 重新解讀歷史符號──「1949」 1949年10月1日中共建國，新中國建立。 1949年12月7日，國民政府遷移台灣，新台灣從此誕生。 台灣海峽兩岸人民各有他們的1949，1949年之於新中國，主要是政治的意義； 1949年之於新台彎，則是文化的意義。 1949年是台灣的年分，它賦予台灣一種歷史定位的架構。 就漢人的觀...

A look at the constant confrontation with mortality the English experienced in a time of plague, smallpox, civil war, and other calamities. In the lives of the rich and poor alike in seventeenth-century England, death was a hovering presence, much more visible in everyday existence than it is today. It is a highly i...

Often portrayed as an awkward, disfigured, and clumsy man, Claudius was the unlikely ruler of the Roman Empire from 41 CE to 54 CE. His reign would prove to be one of the longest of the time even though his rise to the throne did not come without opposition. Virtually no-one in Claudius' family wanted to see him bec...

Subhas Chandra Bose was a revolutionary who sought Indian independence, but as many would contend, he ended up on the wrong side of history. In order to shake off the British yoke, Bose enlisted aid from Germany and Japan during World War II. This has led some to roundly condemn Bose as nothing more than a fascist c...