Cynthia Stokes Brown was an avid reader and researcher. This collection is a digital representation of her personal library with the books categorized as Cynthia had them on the bookshelves in her home.
You can view the collection in it entirety or you can view them by category
American History | Big History| World History | Research | Poetry
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.
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The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1
Jacob Burckhardt
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is an 1860 work on the Italian Renaissance by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Together with his History of the Renaissance in Italy (1867) it is counted among the classics of Renaissance historiography.
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Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus
Thomas Cahill
How did an obscure rabbi from a backwater of the Roman Empire come to be the central figure in Western Civilization? Did his influence in fact change the world? These are the questions Thomas Cahill addresses in his subtle and engaging investigation into the life and times of Jesus.
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The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey From the Big Bang to the Big Brain
William H. Calvin
Written in the form of a scientists diary of a two-week float trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. There we find rocks of great age, fossils, dwellings of Stone Age peoples, and experience the land much as our ancestors did during all those untold generations in the dimly remembered world from which we somehow took flight.
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The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews
Norman F. Cantor
An important, controversial account of the history of the Jewish people that is both scholarly and compulsively readable.
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Mountain: An Evolutionary Epic
William Carney
Have you ever wondered what the universe has in store for you? Scientific revelation and planetary crisis are now expanding the scope of questions that have always stirred when people gaze into the night sky: How big and how old is all of this? How did we come to be and where are we going? Does purpose permeate creation? Where does my story fit within the story of the universe? Join June and her friends for the ultimate campfire story. Journey with them for a week in the backcountry, as they take in the evolving saga of the cosmos and work out their own unfolding lives within that epic context. Share their everyday—and life-shifting—dramas, from love and grief to work and creativity, from spiritual practice to climate crisis, from war to classroom. Unifying this chorus of voices, feel their common wonder at the symphonic chords and abiding dilemmas of cosmic history—here writ large on that thin film of life briefly expressed each summer, between the granite and hard stars of the high Sierra.
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The Big Picture
Sean Carroll
Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?
In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. -
Disease and History
Frederick F. Cartwright
Arising from collaboration between a doctor and a historian, Disease and History offers the general reader a wide-ranging and most accessible account of some of the ways in which disease has left its often dramatic mark on the past.
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The Mind of the South
W. J. Cash
Ever since its publication in 1941, The Mind of the South has been recognized as a path-breaking work of scholarship and as a literary achievement of enormous eloquence and insight in its own right. From its investigation of the Southern class system to its pioneering assessments of the region's legacies of racism, religiosity, and romanticism, W. J. Cash's book defined the way in which millions of readers— on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—would see the South for decades to come.
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Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
Eric Chaisson
How did everything around us-the air, the land, the sea, and the stars-originate? What is the source of order, form, and structure characterizing all material things? These are just some of the grand scientific questions Eric J. Chaisson, author of the classic work Cosmic Dawn, explores in his enthralling and illuminating history of the universe. Explaining new discoveries and a range of cutting-edge ideas and theories, Chaisson provides a creative and coherent synthesis of current scientific thinking on the universe's beginnings. He takes us on a tour of the seven ages of the cosmos, from the formless era of radiation through the origins of human culture. Along the way he examines the development of the most microscopic and the most immense aspects of our universe and the complex ways in which they interact. Drawing on recent breakthroughs in astrophysics and biochemistry, Chaisson discusses the contemporary scientific view that all objects-from quarks and quasars to microbes and the human mind-are interrelated. Researchers in all the natural sciences are beginning to identify an underlying pattern penetrating the fabric of existence-a sweepingly encompassing view of the formation, structure, and function of all objects in our multitudinous universe. Moreover, as Chaisson demonstrates, by deciphering the scenario of cosmic evolution, scientists can also determine how living organisms managed to inhabit the land, generate language, and create culture. Epic of Evolution offers a stunning view of how various changes, operating across almost incomprehensible domains of space and nearly inconceivable stretches of time and through the evolutionary combination of necessity and chance, have given rise to our galaxy, our star, our planet, and ourselves.
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Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature
Eric J. Chaisson
"We are connected to distant space and time not only by our imaginations but also through a common cosmic heritage. Emerging now from modern science is a unified scenario of the cosmos, including ourselves as sentient beings, based on the time-honored concept of change. From galaxies to snowflakes, from stars and planets to life itself, we are beginning to identify an underlying ubiquitous pattern penetrating the fabric of all the natural sciences - a sweepingly encompassing view of the order and structure of every known class of object in our richly endowed universe. This is the subject of Eric Chaisson's new book." "In Cosmic Evolution Chaisson addresses some of the most basic issues we can contemplate: the origin of matter and the origin of life, and the ways matter, life, and radiation interact and change with time. Guided by notions of beauty and symmetry, by the search for simplicity and elegance, by the ambition to explain the widest range of phenomena with the fewest possible principles, Chaisson designs for us an expansive yet intricate model depicting the origin and evolution of all material structures. He shows us that neither new science nor appeals to nonscience are needed to understand the impressive hierarchy of the cosmic evolutionary story, from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind."--Jacket.
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Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society
Bernard Chapais
At some point in the course of evolution―from a primeval social organization of early hominids―all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives―chimpanzees and bonobos―and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think.
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The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many
Noam Chomsky
These wide-ranging interviews, from 1992 and 1993, cover everything from Bosnia and Somalia to biotechnology and nonviolence, with particular attention to the "Third Worldization" of the United States.
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Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
David Christian
An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, Maps of Time is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human beings.
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This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity
David Christian
A great historian can make clear the connections between the first Homo sapiens and today's version of the species, and a great storyteller can make those connections come alive. David Christian is both. This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity makes the journey a fascinating one. Christian takes us from the Big Bang to the earliest foraging era to the present Anthropocene epoch. This popular work, now in its fifth printing, has been reorganized to help the student and expanded to include material on "big history." Enter This Fleeting World - and give up the preconception that anything old is boring. A compact, easy-to-read overview of world history, ideal for curriculum development, classroom preparation, and student review.
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Big History: Between Nothing and Everything
David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin
Big History: Between Nothing and Everything surveys the past not just of humanity, or even of planet Earth, but of the entire universe. In reading this book instructors and students will retrace a voyage that began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang and the appearance of the universe. Big history incorporates findings from cosmology, earth and life sciences, and human history, and assembles them into a single, universal historical narrative of our universe and of our place within it.
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A Glorious Age in Africa: The Story of Three Great African Empires
Daniel Chu and Elliott Skinner
A review of 800 years of African history, focusing on the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, and revealing the military, educational, and political supremacy during that time.
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Space, Time and ManL A Prehistorian's View
Grahame Clark
Human understanding of time and space has been developing since the most primitive societies began to record an awareness of their history and environment. Grahame Clark, a distinguished prehistorian, describes that process and its extension with the emergence of technology, social organisation and the capacity for abstract thought. Moving from preliterate to civilised societies, he charts the various phases of transition, marked most notably by the growth of geographical discovery culminating in the circumnavigation of the earth, and the growth of a deeper, more critical view of human history. Our own period takes this fascinating account into the exploration of outer space and the search for an understanding of man's place in the cosmos.
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1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Eric H. Cline
In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. But the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused such widespread breakdown. How did it happen?
In this major new account of the causes of this "First Dark Ages," Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries.
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The Maya
Michael D. Coe
The Maya has long been established as the best, most readable introduction to the New World’s greatest ancient civilization. Coe and Houston update this classic by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader and student.
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To America and Around the World: The Logs of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan
Christopher Columbus, Antonio Pigafetta, and Adolph Caso
This book contains the daily logs kept by Columbus—himself—and by Magellans’s scribe, Antonio Pigafetta, on their fateful voyages to the unknown Americas and subsequently around the world.
These voyages have unequivocally changed and impacted on the western world like no other event except for the advent of Jesus Christ.
The logs herewith are the first translations into English, and read like any modern adventure story such as Around the World in 80 Days.
In one of his essays, Adolph Caso takes on the polemics surrounding the persona of Columbus—especially the issues of Leif Ericson—with the forged Vinland Map; the issue of Columbus being a Jewishs—with the claims that Columbus secretly worked his Jewish brothers to find a Jewish state in the New World; and whether America should have a Columbus Day. Giacomeelli, on the other hand, tells the story of how America got its name. -
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations
Arthur Cotterell
A wide-ranging, alphabetically arranged overview of the prehistoric world, spanning East and West to study and compare ancient civilizations.
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Sumer and the Sumerians
Harriet Crawford
Mesopotamia produced one of the best-known ancient civilizations, with a literate, urban culture and highly-developed political institutions. Writing primarily for a non-specialist audience but drawing on the most up-to-date historical and archaeological sources, Harriet Crawford reviews the extraordinary social and technological developments in the region over a period of two millennia, from 3800 to 2000 BC. She describes the physical environment and discusses architecture, trade and industry, the development of writing, and changes in social and political structures.
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Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
Antonio Damasio
Joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe—these and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza devoted much of his life's work examining how these emotions supported human survival, yet hundreds of years later the biological roots of what we feel remain a mystery. Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio—whose earlier books explore rational behavior and the notion of the self—rediscovers a man whose work ran counter to all the thinking of his day, pairing Spinoza's insights with his own innovative scientific research to help us understand what we're made of, and what we're here for.
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African Civilization Revisited: From Aniquity to Modern Times
Basil Davidson
This Book Is Concerned With the story of Africa from antiquity to modern times, as told in the chronicles and records of chiefs and kings, travellers and merchant-adventures, poets and pirates and priests, soldiers and persons of learning.
Framed and introduced as a continuous narrative based on what was thought and written at the time, African Civilization Revisited is designed to illustrate the drama and variety, challenge and achievement of humankind in Africa's long history.
It is offered as a contribution to the fuller understanding of Africa today, as well as a guide to the Africa of yesterday and of long ago.
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The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State
Basil Davidson
Basil Davidson is among the most widely read and respected of Africa's historians, and is, as Roland Oliver, author of The Cambridge History of Africa, has observed, "the one best trusted in Black Africa itself." Now, in this often brilliant, unfailingly provocative work, he traces the roots of Africa's independence movement and puts the continent's present-day political instability into historical perspective. Emerging from foreign rule in the 1950s, the African people looked hopefully toward a future of independence and self-determination. But today Africa is a continent in crisis. The root cause, argues Davidson, lies in a historical irony--Africa's liberators, reluctant to embrace Africa's own history, chose to form nation-states based on fundamentally flawed European models. Thus, the sectarian strife of Europe was reproduced in Africa, compromising the new nations almost from the moment of their birth. Filled with stimulating insights, The Black Man's Burden tackles some of the most vexing and fundamental questions of our time. Davidson begins with an inquiry into the pathology of nationalism and tribalism, and shows how they have collided in modern Africa. He demonstrates how the colonial legacy deformed (almost from the start) the project of African liberation. For African freedom fighters, mostly schooled in Western ways, could only imagine an African future inspired by the very West whose shackles they sought to break. Even the language of their discourse was derived from the West. Thus, they turned their backs on whatever might have proved useful and usable from their own African heritage. The creation of nation-states, like the Janus-faced nature of nationalism itself, proved, in the event, to be not so much liberating as suffocating. The state, Davidson argues, became a monster, its ever-inflating bureaucracy enrolled in the service of a particular family or ethnic group or tribe or alliance of tribes. Others, in an effort to resist the depredations of the state (or in a refusal to recognize its legitimacy), sought refuge in networks of tribal solidarity and community. Intelligent, passionate, sophisticated, Davidson explores the evolution of nationalism as it has unfolded in both Africa and Europe. He sheds light into obscure corners, combines scholarship with enthusiasm, and accomplishes that rare feat of turning the reader inside out in order to view the world with fresh eyes. He concludes with a reflection on movements of renewal and democracy that are now pushing their way across the continent.
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Human Sacrifice in History and Today
Nigel Davies
A detailed account of the widespread practice of human sacrifice in virtually every civilization throughout history--including its continued practice today--explores the religious and philosophic thought underlying one of humankind's most startling traditions
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The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Richard Dawkins
A renowned scientist and author of The Selfish Gene provides a sweeping chronicle of more than four billion years of life on Earth, shedding new light on evolutionary theory and history, sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical disperal, and other topics.
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The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins
A preeminent scientist asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society from the Crusades to 9/11. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly. Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design," or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East--or Middle America.--From publisher description.
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Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Richard Dawkins
"Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, and combines them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder."--Jacket.
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The Symbolic Species: The Co-evololution of Language and the Brain
Terrance W. Deacon
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.
Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human. -
First Life: Discovering the Connections Between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began
David Deamer
This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life’s connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. These in turn provided an essential compartment in which more complex molecules assumed new functions required for the origin of life and the beginning of evolution. Deamer takes us from the vivid and unpromising chaos of the Earth four billion years ago up to the present and his own laboratory, where he contemplates the prospects for generating synthetic life. Engaging and accessible, First Life describes the scientific story of astrobiology while presenting a fascinating hypothesis to explain the origin of life.
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Love Letter to the Milky Way: A Book of Poems
Drew Dellinger
A small book of very big poems. Drew Dellinger's poetry reaches out to the far ends of the Milky Way and to the inner depths of the soul. His poetry and performances have captivated thousands across six continents. He is, in the words of Cornell West, "one of the most creative, courageous and prophetic poets of his generation." This power of his poetry is tied to his passion for ecological survival and social justice movements. The Rev. Osagyefo Sekou calls Dellinger "the poet laureate of the global justice democracy movement."
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Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman
As the first full-length study of the history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters offered trenchant insights into the sexual behavior of Americans from colonial times to the present.
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Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenonmenon
Daniel C. Dennett
An innovative thinker tackles the controversial question of why we believe in God and how religion shapes our lives and our future. For a growing number of people, there is nothing more important than religion. It is an integral part of their marriage, child rearing, and community. In this daring new book, distinguished philosopher Dennett takes a hard look at this phenomenon and asks why. Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In a narrative that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. He contends that the "belief in belief" has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.--From publisher
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Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
Frans De Waal
Waal shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait.
