In less than a century, the accepted picture of the universe transformed from a stagnant place, comprised entirely of our own Milky Way galaxy, to a realm inhabited by billions of individual galaxies, hurtling away from one another. We must thank, in...

In January 1935, the Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition departed from Rangoon to explore the Chindwin River valley on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. The party traversed northern Burma, gathering biological specimens and ethnologica...

The desire for dignity is universal and powerful. It is a motivating force behind all human interaction – in families, in communities, in the business world, and in relationships at the international level. When dignity is violated, the response is l...

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), a literary figure of international acclaim and arguably Austria's greatest post-World War II writer, became the first of his generation to expose unrelentingly his country's pathological denial of complicity in the Holoca...

This book examines the small library of 24 separate books common to all Jewish and Christian Bibles – books that preserve the efforts of diverse individuals over the span of many centuries to make sense of their personal experiences and those of thei...

From Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to Michelle Obama's White House organic garden, the image of America as a nation of farmers has persisted from the beginnings of the American experiment. In this rich and evocative collection of agrarian writing fro...

The phrase "Cold War" was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: "We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity". The Soviet U...

Thomas Babington Macaulay's "History of England" was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation's sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire and its claim to be the modern nation, marking t...

The British studio potter Michael Cardew (1901-1983) was a man of paradox, a modernist who disliked modernity, a colonial servant who despised Empire, a husband and father who was also homosexual, and an intellectual who worked with his hands. Gradua...

Disease and commerce are among the most powerful forces that have shaped the modern world. They are also closely intertwined: over many centuries trade has been the single most important factor in the spread of diseases throughout the world. In this...