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Instead, the Reformation influenced the eventual emergence of closed-universe atheism because of the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. The controversies unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about the...
Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story.A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...
I am trained in philosophy and literary analysis. My particular take on the intersection of philosophy and literature consists in using the tools of a literary scholar to analyze a...
Life on Mars is a history book that is about the future. Mars is in our future, probably the very near future. What we already know and what we likely...
The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...
If a browsing reader picked up a copy of the book, I would hope that the Introduction entitled “The Thousand-Person Pit” would hook him or her. An account of an...
I would hope someone stumbling upon That’s Disgusting in a bookstore either first thumbed through the chapter on horror and perverse pleasures (Chapter 6, “Horror Show”), or the chapter on...
Socialist realism was arguably the 20th century’s most successful artistic phenomenon, especially if measured in terms of quantitative output and geographical reach. Yet socialist realism remains notoriously difficult to define....
You wake up in the morning and find that you need to visit a number of cities or towns before returning in the evening. What is the shortest possible route...
In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...
If you come across this book in a bookstore, I hope you will browse the Prologue, “The Death of Shorty,” and that it will draw you in to the rest...
Pages 2 through 5 state what the book is about, its objectives, the historical significance of the story, and my role in it. Allow me to stitch together some of...
Today, on just about every desk there is a gray box emitting a range of wires. Eighty years ago, this data processing box was less conspicuous, non-electronic, and made from...
The Unintended Reformation is a wide-ranging revisionist history that concerns the present as much as the past. It argues that in central respects, North American and European life in the...
Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores combines people, history, and law. The book is composed of six stories about early Americans and how brushes with the law affected everyday life.If the...
I have tried to make this investigation extremely wide. The rarity of documented female rulers in large, well-organized states makes it necessary to find them wherever one can, and as...
The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...
The Russian Revolution seemed to promise human liberation and equality. But instead it produced a Stalinist dictatorship, with extreme interventionism and unprecedented state violence. Why did a government purportedly dedicated...
Normalization of the right is the term that I develop to capture the twin phenomena of the electoral surge of the European right and the mainstreaming of nationalist ideas and...
Constitutional Cliffhangers is about six situations in which the Constitution’s provisions for selecting, replacing, and punishing presidents are seriously vulnerable.Each chapter starts out with a fictional scenario that dramatizes one...
This book is about adopting a longer-term perspective to understand the world we live in.In the 1800s a handful of countries, initially in western Europe and lands settled by Europeans,...
One of the strange things about eradication is how it repeatedly arises, phoenix-like, from its setbacks.Fred Lowe Soper paradoxically embraced the cause of disease eradication in the 1930s, just as...
States of War examines an age-old conflict within constitutional legal states—to what extent can political authorities violate the law in times of crisis, emergency, or war?This question has haunted modern...
Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.Nearly 200 years later he is still...
Between 2009 and 2010, I spent 16 months conducting intensive fieldwork in a Miao and a Dong minority village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province. Situated closely above the southwest border...
My Rutgers-Newark colleague Frank Fischer sent me a couple of articles from the New York Times issue of November 14, 2011. They are about the bitterness of the current generation...
I do not think I can privilege one part of the book over another, but the Preface would be sufficient to draw the reader into the book, since it gives...
Unfortunately, we are all suckers for a good story—a narrative that strings events into a plot with characters driven by motives. If information doesn’t come in story form, we have...
The Justice Cascadeprovides an overview and an evaluation of one of the most important changes in global politics: the rise of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations. In it,...
In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t.His explanation was geographical—it...
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