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.
These are the books she had in her Research collection
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A Short History of Latin America
Benjamin Keen and Mark Wasserman
This best selling text for introductory Latin American history courses mixes a chronological and a national approach to explore the background of this fascinating region. The text' s integrating framework is the dependency theory, which stresses the economic relationship between Latin American nations and wealthier nations, particularly the United States.
The book provides in-depth coverage of society and culture in Latin America and their impact on population, settlement, trade, communication, and economic and political developments.
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Farmers of Forty Centuries
F. H. King
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan is a book of Asian farming. We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.
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Columbus: His Enterprise
Hans Konig
Discusses how the expeditions of Columbus increased the wealth of Spain, yet severely damaged the lives of the native Americans.
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Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth… and Beyond
Lawrence Krauss
Through this astonishing work, he manages to stoke wonder at the powers and unlikely events that conspired to create our solar system, our ecosystem, and us.
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A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing
Lawrence M. Krauss
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the groundbreaking new scientific advances presenting the most recent evidence for how our universe evolved--and the implications for how it's going to end.
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The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers
Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly
Hunting and gathering peoples, including Kalahari Bushmen, Australian aborigines, Eskimos, and Pygmies, are the subject of endless appeal. This illustrated reference volume is the first devoted exclusively to hunting and gathering peoples that is both accessible to the nonspecialist and written by leading scholars. It is a state-of-the-art summary of knowledge on the subject, covering an extraordinary range of materials: case studies of over fifty of the world's hunter-gatherers, the archaeological background, religion and world view, music and art, questions of gender, health and nutrition, and contemporary rights.
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Complexity and the Arrow of Time
Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C. W. Davies, and Michael Ruse
There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and life in particular, is 'getting more complex with time'. This book brings together a wide range of experts in science, philosophy and theology and unveils their joint effort in exploring this idea. They confront essential problems behind the theory of complexity and the role of life within it: what is complexity? When does it increase, and why? Is the universe evolving towards states of ever greater complexity and diversity? If so, what is the source of this universal enrichment? This book addresses those difficult questions, and offers a unique cross-disciplinary perspective on some of the most profound issues at the heart of science and philosophy. Readers will gain insights in complexity that reach deep into key areas of physics, biology, complexity science, philosophy and religion.
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King Solomon's Ring
Konrad Z. Lorenz
Solomon, the legend goes, had a magic ring which enabled him to speak to the animals in their own language. Konrad Lorenz was gifted with a similar power of understanding the animal world. He was that rare beast, a brilliant scientist who could write (and indeed draw) beautifully. He did more than any other person to establish and popularize the study of how animals behave, receiving a Nobel Prize for his work. King Solomon's Ring, the book which brought him worldwide recognition, is a delightful treasury of observations and insights into the lives of all sorts of creatures, from jackdaws and water-shrews to dogs, cats and even wolves. Charmingly illustrated by Lorenz himself, this book is a wonderfully written introduction to the world of our furred and feathered friends, a world which often provides an uncanny resemblance to our own.
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The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth
James Lovelock
Proposes that all living species are components of a single organism and theorizes that the biological processes of the Earth naturally change environmental conditions to enable survival.
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Migration in World History
Patrick Manning
Drawing on examples from a wide range of geographical regions and thematic areas, noted world historian Patrick Manning guides the reader through:
- the earliest human migrations, including the earliest hominids, their development and spread, and the controversy surrounding the rise of homo sapiens
- the rise and spread of major language groups (illustrated with original maps)
- an examination of civilizations, farmers and pastoralists from 3000 BCE to 500 CE
- trade patterns including the early Silk Road and maritime trade in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean
- the effect of migration on empire and industry between 1700 and 1900
- the resurgence of migration in the later twentieth century, including movement to cities, refugees and diasporas
- the various leading theories and debates surrounding the subject of migration.
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Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution
Lynn Margulis
Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations are naturally selected, but they leave unanswered how variant organisms come to be in the first place.In Symbiotic Planet, renowned scientist Lynn Margulis shows that symbiosis, which simply means members of different species living in physical contact with each other, is crucial to the origins of evolutionary novelty. Ranging from bacteria, the smallest kinds of life, to the largest—the living Earth itself—Margulis explains the symbiotic origins of many of evolution's most important innovations. The very cells we're made of started as symbiotic unions of different kinds of bacteria. Sex—and its inevitable corollary, death—arose when failed attempts at cannibalism resulted in seasonally repeated mergers of some of our tiniest ancestors. Dry land became forested only after symbioses of algae and fungi evolved into plants. Since all living things are bathed by the same waters and atmosphere, all the inhabitants of Earth belong to a symbiotic union. Gaia, the finely tuned largest ecosystem of the Earth's surface, is just symbiosis as seen from space. Along the way, Margulis describes her initiation into the world of science and the early steps in the present revolution in evolutionary biology; the importance of species classification for how we think about the living world; and the way “academic apartheid” can block scientific advancement. Written with enthusiasm and authority, this is a book that could change the way you view our living Earth.
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Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology in the later decades of the 20th century and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully written view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and their interconnectedness of all life on the planet.
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The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth tot eh Twenty-first Century
Robert B. Marks
This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment. Robert B. Marks defines the modern world as one marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, increasing inequality within the wealthiest industrialized countries, and an escape from the environmental constraints of the “biological old regime.” He explains its origins by emphasizing contingencies (such as the conquest of the New World); the broad comparability of the most advanced regions in China, India, and Europe; the reasons why England was able to escape from common ecological constraints facing all of those regions by the eighteenth century; a conjuncture of human and natural forces that solidified a gap between the industrialized and non-industrialized parts of the world; and the mounting environmental crisis that defines the modern world.
Now in a new edition that brings the saga of the modern world to the present in an environmental context, the book considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the twentieth century and became the sole superpower by the twenty-first century, and why the changed relationship of humans to the environmental likely will be the hallmark of the modern era—the “Anthopocene.” Once again arguing that the U.S. rise to global hegemon was contingent, not inevitable, Marks also points to the resurgence of Asia and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment that may in the long run overshadow any political and economic milestones of the past hundred years. -
Plagues and Peoples
William H. McNeill
Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the history of disease is the history of humankind.
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The Islamic World
William H. McNeill and Marilyn Robinson Waldman
The Islamic World is a collection of important and representative documents from all periods of Islamic history. From the formative years in Arabia to the confrontations with and responses to modernity, these translations indicate the continuity and development of the youngest of the world's greatest civilizations. Included are historical, theological, philosophical, and political writings, as well as poetry and narratives, from Muslim writers in the Arab lands, Turkey, Persia, and other parts of the Islamic world. The editors have provided informative introductions to each historical period and to the individual texts, making this an enlightening and intriguing first look at Islamic civilization and tradition.
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Columbus and the World Around Him
Milton Meltzer
Describes the voyages of Columbus, the terrible impact of the Spaniards on the Indians, and the ultimate cultural influence of the Native Americans on their white conquerors.
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Slavery: A World History
Milton Meltzer
Slavery is not and has never been a "peculiar institution," but one that is deeply rooted in the history and economy of most countries. Although it has flourished in some periods and declined in others, human bondage for profit has never been eradicated completely. In Slavery: A World History renowned author Milton Meltzer traces slavery from its origins in prehistoric hunting societies; through the boom in slave trading that reached its peak in the United States with a pre-Civil War slave population of 4,000,000; through the forced labor under the Nazi regime and in the Soviet gulags; and finally to its widespread practice in many countries today, such as the debt bondage that miners endure in Brazil or the prostitution into which women are sold in Thailand.
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The Course of Mexican History
Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman
Mexico's political, social, and economic landscapes have shifted in very striking ways in recent years and the country now moves cautiously forward in the twenty-first century. Revised to address these remarkable transformations, The Course of Mexican History, now in its tenth edition, offers a completely up-to-date, lively, and engaging survey from the pre-Columbian times to the present.
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The Prehistory of the Mind:The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science
Steven Mithen
Here is an exhilarating intellectual performance, in the tradition of Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind and Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. On the way to showing how the world of our ancient ancestors shaped our modern modular mind, Steven Mithen shares one provocative insight after another as he answers a series of fascinating questions:
- Were our brains hard-wired in the Pleistocene Era by the needs of hunter-gatherers?
- When did religious beliefs first emerge?
- Why were the first paintings made by humankind so technically accomplished and expressive?
- What can the sexual habits of chimpanzees tell us about the prehistory of the modern mind?
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General History of Africa, Vol. II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa
G. Mokhtar
Volume 2 covers the period beginning at the close of the Neolithic era, from around the eighth millenium before our era. This period of some nine thousand years has been sub-divided into four major geographical zones. Chapters 1 to 12 cover the Nile, Egypt and Nubia: by far the largest part of the book is devoted to the ancient civilization of Egypt because of its pre-eminent place in the early history of Africa. Chapters 13 to 16 relate to the Ethiopian highlands. Chapters 17 to 20 describe the Maghrib and its Sahara hinterland, and Chapters 21 to 29 the rest of Africa including some of the Indian Ocean islands. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.
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Christopher Columbus, Mariner
Samuel Eliot Morison
One of the great adventure tales of all time, this is the breathtaking story of Christopher Columbus, the canny and skillful Genoese sailor who set out to explore the Indies and discovered the New World instead! Columbus's journeys in tiny ships across thousands of miles of unknown oceans, battling all kinds of weather and often dealing with unruly crews, are among the most significant achievements of recorded history.
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Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex
Harold J. Morowitz
When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts--indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts and represents something utterly new and different--we call that phenomenon emergence. When the chemicals diffusing in the primordial waters came together to form the first living cell, that was emergence. When the activities of the neurons in the brain result in mind, that too is emergence.
In The Emergence of Everything, one of the leading scientists involved in the study of complexity, Harold J. Morowitz, takes us on a sweeping tour of the universe, a tour with 28 stops, each one highlighting a particularly important moment of emergence. For instance, Morowitz illuminates the emergence of the stars, the birth of the elements and of the periodic table, and the appearance of solar systems and planets. We look at the emergence of living cells, animals, vertebrates, reptiles, and mammals, leading to the great apes and the appearance of humanity. He also examines tool making, the evolution of language, the invention of agriculture and technology, and the birth of cities. And as he offers these insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, and life itself, Morowitz also seeks out the nature of God in the emergent universe, the God posited by Spinoza, Bruno, and Einstein, a God Morowitz argues we can know through a study of the laws of nature.
Written by one of our wisest scientists, The Emergence of Everything offers a fascinating new way to look at the universe and the natural world, and it makes an important contribution to the dialogue between science and religion. -
Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe
Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison, and Office of Charles and Ray Eames
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Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
Richard A. Muller
We live in complicated, dangerous times. Present and future presidents need to know if North Korea's nascent nuclear capability is a genuine threat to the West, if biochemical weapons are likely to be developed by terrorists, if there are viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government, if private companies should be allowed to lead the way on space exploration, and what the actual facts are about the worsening threats from climate change. This is "must-have" information for all presidents―and citizens―of the twenty-first century. >
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Cliffs Quick Review: Chemistry
Harold D. Nathan and Charles Henrickson
CliffsNotes Quick Review guides give you a clear, concise, easy-to-use review of the basics. Introducing each topic, defining key terms, and carefully walking you through sample problems, this guide helps you grasp and understand the important concepts needed to succeed.
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Take Over: How Euroman Changed the World
Arthur Niehoff
A retired anthropologist attempts to explain the conquering of the New World, plunder of natural resources, and global imposition of Christianity to aliens who cannot fathom twenty-first-century Earth's homogeneous business structure
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The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues, Famine and Other Scourges
Andrew Nikiforuk
A history of epidemics, plagues, and famines chronicles the disastrous effects of these often cataclysmic events on the individual and on human history
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Babylon
Joan Oates
Dr. Oates describes the rise of Babylon from Sargon of Agade to Hammurabi, the great law-giver under whom in the 18th century BC the city first attained pre-eminence. She charts its progress under his successors, its greatest period of empire during he reigns of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus in the 6th century BC, and its decay and final abandonment as Persians and Greeks turned Mesopotamia into a battleground.
- excerpt from book jacket -
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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
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The Essentials of Ancient History: 4,500 BC to 500 AD, The Emergence of Western Civilization
Gordon M. Patterson
REA’s Essentials provide quick and easy access to critical information in a variety of different fields, ranging from the most basic to the most advanced. As its name implies, these concise, comprehensive study guides summarize the essentials of the field covered. Essentials are helpful when preparing for exams, doing homework and will remain a lasting reference source for students, teachers, and professionals. Ancient History: 4500 BC to 500 AD discusses Mesopotamian civilization, Egyptian civilization, Hebrew civilization, Greek civilization, Alexander and the Hellenistic Age, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and Christianity in the ancient world.
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How the Mind Works
Steven Pinker
In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational―and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life.
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined
Steven Pinker
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?
This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society. -
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 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.
