Joseph Stalin's death was a defining event in Soviet history. In its aftermath, the state was forced to reconceive its political, economic, social, and cultural identity. This volume includes new contributions from an international collection of rese...

The Seven Years' War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India. In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of Eu...

All groups tell stories about their beginnings. Such tales are oft-repeated, finely wrought, and usually much beloved. Among those institutions most in need of an impressive creation account is the state: it's one of the primary ways states attempt t...

Imprisoned in the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Sir Walter Ralegh spent the next seven years producing his massive "History of the World". Created with the aid of a library of more than five hundred books he was allowed...

In this book Rose illuminates the extraordinary creativity of Jewish intellectuals as they reevaluated Judaism with the tools of a German philosophical tradition fast emerging as central to modern intellectual life. While previous work emphasizes the...

Eliezer Gruenbaum (1908-1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Gruenbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry who later became the chairman of the...

Historians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin's evolutionary thoug...

Through the first half of the twentieth century, emotions were a legitimate object of scientific study across a variety of disciplines. After 1945, however, in the wake of Nazi irrationalism, emotions became increasingly marginalized and postwar rati...

"The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France" examines the turbulent history of the ideas, people, and institutions of French colonial and tropical medicine from their early modern origins through World War I. Until the 1890s colonial medicine was i...

From its traces in cryptic images on the dollar bill to Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol", Freemasonry has long been one of the most romanticized secret societies in the world. But a simple fact escapes most depictions of this elite brotherhood: There ar...