In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a...

Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities – Germaine de Stael, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier – Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionali...

Much like Vladimir Lenin, his onetime rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party during its formative years, Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) was a visionary. In two science fiction novels set on Mars, Bogdanov imagined a future in which the worke...

In Jennifer Summit's account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, wh...

The orthodox view of Vyacheslav Molotov is that he was no more than Stalin's faithful servant; a dogmatic conservative communist of little or no imagination. Molotov was, indeed, Stalin's right-hand man while from the 1920s the two men presided over...

Based on meticulous research in previously unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this compelling book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his notorious dictatorship. Ol...

In this wide-ranging and stimulating book, a leading authority on the history of medicine and science presents convincing evidence that Dutch commerce-not religion-inspired the rise of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Harold J. Coo...

"I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head". From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre's memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled Fascist Italy and Mu...

This powerful book offers the first detailed examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. In vivid prose it offers a fascinating study of five exemplary proceedings-the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the Israeli...

This memoir tells the story of the Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto who defied the Nazis against impossible odds. Kazik and his fellow Jews smuggled in arms and explosives, performed acts of resistance, held off the Nazi army for almos...