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...
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 . . ....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
More than three centuries after its creation, calculus remains a dazzling intellectual achievement and the gateway into higher mathematics. This book charts its growth and development by sampling from the work of some of its foremost practitioners, beginning with Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the late seventeenth century and...
"John Nash's creative work in game theory has of course had the most profound influence on both its mathematics and its practical applications in economics. It is very good to see his work in this area joined with his other mathematical contributions in a single volume, to give a more rounded perspective."--Kenneth J. Arrow, 1972 Nobel...
"Paul Nahin's Digital Dice is a marvelous book, one that is even better than his Duelling Idiots. Nahin presents twenty-one great probability problems, from George Gamow's famous elevator paradox (as corrected by Donald Knuth) to a bewildering puzzle involving two rolls of toilet paper, and he solves them all with the aid...
