Since antiquity, mercy has been regarded as a virtue. The power of monarchs was legitimated by their acts of clemency, their mercy demonstrating their divine nature. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, mercy had become “an injustice committed against society . . ....
An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West
This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses...
How silver influenced two hundred years of world history, and why it matters today
This is the story of silver’s transformation from soft money during the nineteenth century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by...
The scientific study of complex systems has transformed a wide range of disciplines in recent years, enabling researchers in both the natural and social sciences to model and predict phenomena as diverse as earthquakes, global warming, demographic patterns, financial crises, and the failure of materials. In this book, Didier Sornette boldly...
An in-depth exploration of documentary forgery at the turn of the first millennium
Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began...
How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murder
After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that...
On their 100th anniversary, the story of the extraordinary scientific expeditions that ushered in the era of relativity
In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein’s revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the...
An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the dead in Africa have developed over four centuries
In My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, John Parker explores...
A savory account of how the pursuit of delicious foods shaped human evolution
Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of...
A compelling exploration of how our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy
We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change?even if it means undermining the foundations of our...
This is a book about everything. Or, to be precise, it explores how everything is connected from code to culture. We think we're designing software, services, and experiences, but we're not. We are intervening in ecosystems. Until we open our minds, we will forever repeat our mistakes. In this spirited tour of information architecture...
API development is becoming increasingly common for server-side developers thanks to the rise of front-end JavaScript frameworks, iPhone applications, and API-centric architectures. It might seem like grabbing stuff from a data source and shoving it out as JSON would be easy, but surviving changes in business logic, database schema updates,...
