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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Medieval Cities
Henri Pirene
Nearly a century after it was first published in 1925, Medieval Cities remains one of the most provocative works of medieval history ever written. Here, Henri Pirenne argues that it was not the invasion of the Germanic tribes that destroyed the civilization of antiquity, but rather the closing of Mediterranean trade by Arab conquest in the seventh century. The consequent interruption of long-distance commerce accelerated the decline of the ancient cities of Europe. Pirenne challenges conventional wisdom by attributing the origins of medieval cities to the revival of trade, tracing their growth from the tenth century to the twelfth. He also describes the important role the middle class played in the development of the modern economic system and modern culture.
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The Pink Triangle: The Nazi war Against Homosexuals
Richard Plant
This is the first comprehensive book in English on the fate of the homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The author, a German refugee, examines the climate and conditions that gave rise to a vicious campaign against Germany's gays, as directed by Himmler and his SS--persecution that resulted in tens of thousands of arrests and thousands of deaths.
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The Botany of Desire
Michael Pollan
Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?
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The Travels of Marco Polo The Venetian
Marco Polo
Marco Polo (1254 to January 8, 1324) was a Venetian explorer known for the book "The Travels of Marco Polo", which describes his voyage to and experiences in Asia. Polo traveled extensively with his family, journeying from Europe to Asia from 1271 to 1295 and remaining in China for 17 of those years.
Marco Polo’s stories about his travels in Asia were published as a book called "The Description of the World", later known as "The Travels of Marco Polo". Just a few years after returning to Venice from China, Marco commanded a ship in a war against the rival city of Genoa. He was eventually captured and sentenced to a Genoese prison, where he met a fellow prisoner and writer named Rustichello. As the two men became friends, Marco told Rustichello about his time in Asia, what he'd seen, where he'd travelled and what he'd accomplished.
The book made Marco a celebrity. It was printed in French, Italian and Latin, becoming the most popular read in Europe. But few readers allowed themselves to believe Marco's tale. They took it to be fiction, the construct of a man with a wild imagination. -
Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica
Christophe A. Pool
Between 1500 and 500 BC the Olmecs flourished in the tropical lowlands of Mexico's Gulf Coast, creating the most complex of Mesoamerica's early societies and its first monumental art. Emphasising the strategies of political leaders and the environmental and social diversity within the Olmec region, this up-to-date and comprehensive study describes the history of Olmec research, synthesises recent scholarship on the ecology, economy, socio-political organisation and ideology of Olmec society, and evaluates current debates over the influence of the Olmecs on their contemporaries and their contributions to later Mesoamerican civilisations.
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Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage
Emily Post
The one book that will guide everyone - bride and housewife, bachelor and husband, secretary and executive, grandparent and teen-ager - to good taste in gracious modern living.
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The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos
Joel P. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams
In this strikingly original book, a world-renowned cosmologist and an innovative writer of the history and philosophy of science uncover an astonishing truth: Humans actually are central to the universe. What does this mean for our culture and our personal lives? The answer is revolutionary: a science-based cosmology that allows us to understand the universe as a whole and our extraordinary place in it.
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What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology
Addy Pross
Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger posed a profound question: 'What is life, and how did it emerge from non-life?' This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists ever since.
Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology? What could have led the first replicating molecules up such a path? Now, developments in the emerging field of 'systems chemistry' are unlocking the problem. Addy Pross shows how the different kind of stability that operates among replicating molecules results in a tendency for chemical systems to become more complex and acquire the properties of life. Strikingly, he demonstrates that Darwinian evolution is the biological expression of a deeper, well-defined chemical concept: the whole story from replicating molecules to complex life is one continuous process governed by an underlying physical principle. The gulf between biology and the physical sciences is finally becoming bridged. -
Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
Ishmael is an utterly unique and captivating spiritual adventure which redefines what it is to be human. We are introduced to Ishmael, a creature of immense wisdom. He has a story to tell, one that no human being has ever heard before. It is the story of man's place in the grand scheme, and it begins at the birth of time. This history of the world has never appeared in any schoolbook. "Does the earth belong to man?" Ishmael asks. "Or does man belong to the earth?"
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Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment
Joachim Radkau
'Nature and Power' explores the interaction between humanity and the natural environment from prehistoric times to the present. At the same time, it aims to demonstrate that the changing relationship between humanity and nature is key to understanding world history.
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Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization
Paul Raskin
We have entered the Planetary Phase of Civilization. Strands of interdependence are weaving humanity and Earth into a single community of fate—the overarching proto-country herein christened Earthland. In the unsettled twenty-first century, the drama of social evolution will play out on a world stage with the perils many and dark premonitions all too plausible. Still, a Great Transition to a planetary civilization of enriched lives and a healthy planet remains possible. But how? What forms of collective action and consciousness can redirect us toward such a future? Who will lead the charge? What might such a world look like? Journey to Earthland offers answers. It clarifies the world-historical challenge; explains the critical role of a global citizens movement in advancing social transformation; and paints a picture of the kind of flourishing civilization that might lie on the other side of a Great Transition.
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When God is Gone Everything is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist
Chet Raymo
"In what he describes as a "late-life credo," Raymo traces a half-century Catholicism to scientific agnosticism. The point of religion, he asserts, is to celebrate the unfathomable mystery of creation. Thus, he believes, "My work as a teacher and writer has been to discover glimmers of the Absolute in every particular, and praise what I find." Raymo takes the reader on a tour de force of science, philosophy, theology, and literature as he gathers together the rich array of voices of his many traveling companions. With wonderfully detailed anecdotes, Raymo brings to life a diverse cadre of mentors such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Darwin, and Teilhard de Chardin. Whether exploring the connection of the human body to the stars or the meaning of prayer of the heart, these challenging reflections will cause believers and agnostics alike to pause and pay attention"--Dust jacket flap.
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The Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology
John H. Relethford
The Human Species provides a comprehensive approach to biological anthropology, especially the relationship between biology and culture, behavior in an evolutionary context, and humans as a species within the primate order. With its lively narrative and emphasis on the most current topics and findings in the field, The Human Species explores the major questions that concern biological anthropologists about our species.
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Dogs of God: Columbus, The Inquisition, and the Defeat fo the Moors
James Reston Jr.
From the acclaimed author of Warriors of God comes a riveting account of the pivotal events of 1492, when towering political ambitions, horrific religious excesses, and a drive toward international conquest changed the world forever.James Reston, Jr., brings to life the epic story of Spain’s effort to consolidate its own burgeoning power by throwing off the yoke of the Vatican. By waging war on the remaining Moors in Granada and unleashing the Inquisitor Torquemada on Spain’s Jewish and converso population, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella attained enough power and wealth to fund Columbus’ expedition to America and to chart a Spanish destiny separate from that of Italy. With rich characterizations of the central players, this engrossing narrative captures all the political and religious ferment of this crucial moment on the eve of the discovery of the New World.
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Farming in the Iron Age
Peter J. Reynolds
An account of farming, building, and daily life in the Iron Age in Britain based on experimental archaeological reconstructions.
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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Matt Ridley
The "New York Times"--Bestselling author of "Genome" and "The Red Queen" offers a provocative case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change--cultural evolution--will inevitably increase human prosperity.
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In The Beginning: world History from Human Evolution to the First States
Lauren Ristvet
This engaging and accessible volume draws on the most recent historical archeological scholarship to tell the stories of human evolution, "gathering and hunting" societies, and the distinct breakthroughs that led to the emergence of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. Highlighting both the separate paths and the intersecting journeys of diverse human communities, In the Beginning provides the essential but often neglected foundation on which all subsequent historical development was constructed.
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Freedom and Necessity: An Introduction to the Study of Society
Joan Robinson
Originally published in 1970, this book examines the origins of social organizations, the development of Robinson Crusoe economies and the conception of property or rightful ownership, as well as the origins of agriculture, race and class. Discussing commerce and the nation state, capitalist expansion and war between industrial power, the book is a concise yet comprehensive survey of the evolution of the structures of the world’s economies and of the ideas which underlie them.
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Dances with the Earth: Geophonic Music from the Stratigraphic Record of Central Italy
Gabriele Rossetti and Alessandro Montanari
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Ancient Iraq
Georges Roux
Newly revised and containing information from recent excavations and discovered artifacts, Ancient Iraq covers the political, cultural, and socio-economic history from Mesopotamia days of prehistory to the Christian era.
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Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli
'Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.' These seven short, simple lessons guide us through the scientific revolution that shook physics in the twentieth century and still continues to shake us today. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, a founder of the loop quantum gravity theory, explains Einstein's theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind. In under eighty pages, readers will understand the most transformative scientific discoveries of the twentieth century and what they mean for us
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Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
William F. Ruddiman
The impact on climate from 200 years of industrial development is an everyday fact of life, but did humankind's active involvement in climate change really begin with the industrial revolution, as commonly believed? Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum has sparked lively scientific debate since it was first published--arguing that humans have actually been changing the climate for some 8,000 years--as a result of the earlier discovery of agriculture.
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Everybody's Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution
Loyal Rue
"Everybody's Story offers an exhilarating tour of natural history that illuminates the evolution of matter, life, and consciousness. As old myths, religious stories, and other shared narratives of humankind are increasingly viewed as intellectually implausible and morally irrelevant, they become less likely to fulfill their original purpose - to give people answers and provide a sense of stability and peace in daily life. Loyal Rue restores that imbalance with a new story based on fact."--Jacket.
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Evolutionary History: Uniting History ad Biology to Understand Life on Earth
Edmund Russell
We tend to see history and evolution springing from separate roots, one grounded in the human world and the other in the natural world. Human beings have, however, become probably the most powerful species shaping evolution today, and human-caused evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history. This book introduces readers to evolutionary history, a new field that unites history and biology to create a fuller understanding of the past than either can produce on its own. Evolutionary history can stimulate surprising new hypotheses for any field of history and evolutionary biology. How many art historians would have guessed that sculpture encouraged the evolution of tuskless elephants? How many biologists would have predicted that human poverty would accelerate animal evolution? How many military historians would have suspected that plant evolution would convert a counter-insurgency strategy into a rebel subsidy? With examples from around the globe, this book will help readers see the broadest patterns of history and the details of their own life in a new light.
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Noah's Flood: the New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History
William Ryan and Walter Pitman
For thousands of years, the legend of a great flood has endured in the biblical story of Noah and in such Middle Eastern myths as the epic of Gilgamesh. Few believed that such a catastrophic deluge had actually occurred. But now geophysicists have discovered an event that changed history, a sensational flood 7,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea. Using sound waves and coring devices to probe the sea floor, they discovered clear evidence that this inland body of water had once been a vast freshwater lake lying hundreds of feet below the level of the world's rising oceans. The authors explore the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence suggesting that the flood rapidly created a human diaspora that spread as far as Western Europe, Central Asia, China, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf. They suggest that the Black Sea People could well have been the mysterious proto-Sumerians, who developed the first great civilization in Mesopotamia, the source of our own.
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The New Archaelology and the Ancient Maya
Jeremy A. Sabloff
Using high-tech equipment, chemical analyses and sampling strategies, archaeologists are learning more about how and why cultures change. Using the study of the Maya as a test case, this book shows how the transformation of archaeology has brought new understanding of past civilizations.
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The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism
Aaron Sachs
"The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) achieved unparalleled fame in his own time, particularly in the United States. Today, however, he and his enormous legacy to American thought are virtually unknown." "In The Humboldt Current, Aaron Sachs seeks to reverse this undeserved obscurity by tracing Humboldt's pervasive influence on American history, specifically looking at the lives and careers of several nineteenth-century explorers who used Humboldt's notion of "unity in diversity" and his open-hearted spirit of exploration to develop a critique of their increasingly industrialized society."--Jacket.
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Cosmos
Carl Sagan
Cosmos is one of the bestselling science books of all time. In clear-eyed prose, Sagan reveals a jewel-like blue world inhabited by a life form that is just beginning to discover its own identity and to venture into the vast ocean of space.
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The Dragons of Eden
Carl Sagan
A presentation of the physical development of human intelligence. Includes color fold-out prehistoric illustration on inside front cover.
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Islands of History
Marshall Sahlins
Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.
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The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy
Kirkpatrick Sale
Christopher Columbus' arrival on a small Bahamian island in 1492 is often judged to be a defining moment in the history of mankind, changing forever the map of the world. Kirkpatrick Sale offers readers a unique take on Columbus and his legacy, separating the man from the legend. Sale also looks at the global consequences of the discovery, revealing the colossal impact this brief moment in history had not only on a continent but also on the world. Now with a new introduction by Sale, this classic book is being re-issued for the 500th aniversary of Columbus' death in the heart of Castille.
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A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscentist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
Robert M. Sapolsky
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons.
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The Human Past
Chris Scarre
The Human Past has established itself as a thorough and authoritative survey of human prehistory and the development of civilizations. Written by an international team of respected experts in the field, it presents a streamlined overview that can be broken down into a series of chapters focusing on individual regions and time periods.
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The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Signficance in a Universe of Planets and Probabliities
Caleb Scharf
In The Copernicus Complex, the renowned astrophysicist Caleb Scharf takes us on a scientific adventure, from tiny microbes within the Earth to distant exoplanets, probability theory, and beyond, arguing that there is a solution to this contradiction, a third way of viewing our place in the cosmos, if we weigh the evidence properly. As Scharf explains, we do occupy an unusual time in a 14-billion-year-old universe, in a somewhat unusual type of solar system surrounded by an ocean of unimaginable planetary diversity: hot Jupiters with orbits of less than a day, planet-size rocks spinning around dead stars, and a wealth of alien super-Earths. Yet life here is built from the most common chemistry in the universe, and we are a snapshot taken from billions of years of biological evolution. Bringing us to the cutting edge of scientific discovery, Scharf shows how the answers to fundamental questions of existence will come from embracing the peculiarity of our circumstance without denying the Copernican vision.
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The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century
Walter Scheidel
"Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling--mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues--have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent--and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon."--Publisher's description.
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How Writing Came About
Denise Schmandt-Besserat
In 1992, the University of Texas Press published Before Writing, Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform and Before Writing, Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens. In these two volumes, Denise Schmandt-Besserat set forth her groundbreaking theory that the cuneiform script invented in the Near East in the late fourth millennium B.C.—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device.How Writing Came About draws material from both volumes to present Schmandt-Besserat's theory for a wide public and classroom audience. Based on the analysis and interpretation of a selection of 8,000 tokens or counters from 116 sites in Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Turkey, it documents the immediate precursor of the cuneiform script.
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Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents
Bruce J. Schulman
Examine the issues and controversies that grew out of Lyndon Johnson's presidency which have renewed importance today through the voices of Johnson, his aides, his opponents, and his interpreters in Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism.
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Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization
Roy Scranton
In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality.
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Myth: A Very Short Introduction
Robert A. Segal
Where do myths come from? What is their function and what do they mean? In this Very Short Introduction Robert Segal introduces the array of approaches used to understand the study of myth. These approaches hail from disciplines as varied as anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, philosophy, science, and religious studies. Including ideas from theorists as varied as Sigmund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, Albert Camus, and Roland Barthes, Segal uses the famous ancient myth of Adonis to analyse their individual approaches and theories. In this new edition, he not only considers the future study of myth, but also considers the interactions of myth theory with cognitive science, the implications of the myth of Gaia, and the differences between story-telling and myth.
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Memoir of a Race Traitor
Mab Segrest
"Back in print after more than a decade, the singular chronicle of life at the forefront of antiracist activism, with a new introduction and afterword by the author. In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she 'had become a woman haunted by the dead.' Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family's history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a 'courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.' Adrienne Rich wrote that it was 'a unique document and thoroughly fascinating.' Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. Now, amid our current national crisis driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition of her classic book. With a new introduction and afterword that explore what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump--and to what can and must be done. Called 'a true delight' and a 'must-read' (Minnesota Review), Memoir of a Race Traitor is an inspiring and politically potent book. With brand-new power and relevance in 2019, this is a book that far transcends its genre."-- Provided by publisher.
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Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery
Rupert Sheldrake
"In Science Set Free, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas that are not only limiting, but also dangerous for the future of humanity"--Front jacket flap.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.
