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 World History collection
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Religion and Belief Systems in World History
Roger B. Beck and Elisa A. Carillo
This book presents a global survey of world religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and belief systems (from animism to Zoroastrianism), with major themes including how spiritual beliefs both supported and railed against war, and how religions expanded and divided across cultures and borders.
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Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past
Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler
Traditions & Encounters also has a rich history of firsts: the first world history text to take a truly global perspective on the past; the first to emphasise connections among cultures; the first to combine twin themes with a seven-part framework, making the huge story of world history more manageable to both teach and learn. Now Traditions & Encounters becomes the first truly interactive world history program: one that marries groundbreaking adaptive diagnostics and interactivities with a captivating narrative and engaging visuals, creating a unique learning environment that propels greater student success and better course results.
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On History
Fernand Braudel
"The great French historian Fernand Braudel has done what only giants can: he has made Western man confront the problem of time—individual time, historical time, relative time, real time. . . . Braudel, more than any other historian, has wrestled with man's conception of time over time. . . What a magnificent fight he has fought." - Virginia Quarterly Review
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Breaking NewGround: A PersonalHistory
Lester R. Brown
The environmentalist describes how he created a successful tomato business as a teenager, worked at the USDA, and founded two non-profit organizations that have drawn attention to climate change and lagging agricultural productivity.
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The Nature and the Study of History
Henry Steele Commager
An overview of the nature and methods of history as a field in social science, written for educators.
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The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin and Nora Barlow
Charles Darwin's Autobiography was first published in 1887, five years after his death. It was a bowdlerized edition: Darwin's family, attempting to protect his posthumous reputation, had deleted all the passages they considered too personal or controversial. The present complete edition did not appear until 1959, one hundred years after the publication of The Origin of Species. Upon its appearance, Loren Eiseley wrote: "No man can pretend to know Darwin who does not know his autobiography. Here, for the first time since his death, it is presented complete and unexpurgated, as it exists in the family archives. It will prove invaluable to biographers and cast new light on the personality of one of the world's greatest scientists. Nora Barlow, Darwin's granddaughter, has proved herself a superb editor. Her own annotations make fascinating reading." The daring and restless mind, the integrity and simplicity of Darwin's character are revealed in this direct and personal account of his life--his family, his education, his explorations of the natural world, his religion and philosophy. The editor has provided page and line references to the more important restored passages, and previously unpublished notes and letters on family matters and on the controversy between Darwin and Samuel Butler appear in an appendix.
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Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
Richard Dawkins
Dawkins shares with us his infectious sense of wonder at the natural world, his enjoyment of the absurdities of human interaction, and his bracing awareness of life's brevity: all of which have made a deep imprint on our culture
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Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought
David Hackett Fischer
"If one laughs when David Hackett Fischer sits down to play, one will stay to cheer. His book must be read three times: the first in anger, the srcond in laughter, the third in respect....The wisdom is expressed with a certin ruthlessness. Scarcly a major historian escapes unscathed. Ten thousand members of the AmericanHistorical Association will rush to the index and breathe a little easier to find their names absent.
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On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Masters of Modern History
J. H. Hexter
J. H. Hexter, one of the nation’s most distinguished historians, reflects on some major historical works and their authors: Carl Becker, Wallace Ferguson, Hiram Hayden, Fernand Braudel, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill, and J. G. A. Pocock. The nature and condition of historical proof are Hexter’s continual concerns as he examines the varying interpretations of history in early modern times, probing each thesis and testing it by marshaling the evidence offered in its support and counter-evidence that displays its vulnerability. Writing with pungency and wit, Hexter engages the reader with his authoritative and often controversial frameworks of historical truth.
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Disclosing the Past: an Autobiography
Mary Leakey
This is Mary Leaky's remarkable story of her unique thirty-year partnership with Louis Leaky, of their discoveries on the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzaniea, and of her emergence from the "unsung hero" of the Leakey clan to her recognition today as one of the world's eminent archeologists.
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Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life
William H. McNeill
One of the most remarkable thinkers of this century, Arnold Toynbee won world-wide recognition as the author of the monumental ten-volume A Study of History. Its publication and phenomenal success brought him fame and the highest praise, as the reading public proclaimed him the most renowned scholar in the world. This thought-provoking, engaging study of Toynbee, written by one of today's most eminent historians, weaves together Toynee's intellectual accomplishments and the personal difficulties of his private life. Providing both an intimate portrait of a leading thinker and a judicious evaluation of his work and his legacy for the the study of history, William H. McNeill offers both a biography and a commentary on how to write and understand history. Along with an illuminating discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of A Study of History and the countless other works written by Toynbee, McNeill offers a compelling examination of the responses of other historians (including the devastating attack launched by Hugh Trevor-Roper) and Toynbee's attempts to modify his Study to answer these criticisms. McNeill also explores his tormented personal life, including his troubled marriage to Rosalind Murray and the suicide of his son, Anthony. In this sympathetic depiction of a life, both triumphant and tragic, McNeill brings his skills to bear on one of the greatest figures in his field, illuminating a career of rare accomplishment.
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The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir
William H. McNeill
William H. McNeill's seminal book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) received the National Book Award in 1964 and was later named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library. From his post at the University of Chicago, McNeill became one of the first contemporary North American historians to write world history, seeking a broader interpretation of human affairs than prevailed in his youth. This candid, intellectual memoir from one of the most famous and influential historians of our era, The Pursuit of Truth charts the development of McNeill's thinking and writing over seven decades. At the core of his worldview is the belief that historical truth does not derive exclusively from criticizing, paraphrasing, and summarizing written documents, nor is history merely a record of how human intentions and plans succeeded or failed. Instead, McNeill believes that human lives are immersed in vast overarching processes of change. Ecological circumstances frame and limit human action, while in turn humans have been able to alter their environment more and more radically as technological skill and knowledge increased. McNeill believes that the human adventure on earth is unique, and that it rests on an unmatched system of communication. The web of human communication, whether spoken, written, or digital, has fostered both voluntary and involuntary cooperation and sustained behavioral changes, permitting a single species to spread over an entire planet and to alter terrestrial flows of energy and ideas to an extraordinary degree. Over the course of his career as a historian, teacher, and mentor, McNeill expounded the range of history and integrated it into an evolutionary worldview uniting physical, biological, and intellectual processes. Accordingly, The Pursuit of Truth explores the personal and professional life of a man who affected the way a core academic discipline has been taught and understood in America.
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Summers Long Ago: on Grandfather's Farm and in Grandmother's Kitchen
William H. McNeill and Ruth J. NcNeill
This book is for families---for grandparents to read aloud to their grandchildren, for beginning readers to read to their parents, and for parents and children to read together. It is also for teachers and young students who want to know what life was like on a family farm before furnaces, running water, and electricity changed housekeeping and before cars, trucks, and tractors changed work in the fields, a time when cows had to be milked by hand every day and when almost all of what chickens, pigs, cows, horses, and people ate came directly from the farm. These stories of a city boy's learning to fish for trout in the brook, gather wild blueberries and mushrooms in the back pasture, and dig clams on the shore are an introduction to a distant but still emotionally vibrant aspect of the human past.
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The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir
Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley was born in London in 1919. She is one of the most renowned moral philosophers of her generation and the author of many books, including Beast of Man, Wickedness and The Myths We Live By. She has taken part in many broadcast events, including The Moral Maze and Woman's Hour.
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A Green History of the World: The environment of the Collapse of Great Civilizations
Clive Ponting
Clive Ponting's book studies the relationship between the environment and human history. It examines world civilizations from Sumeria to ancient Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earth's resources, only to expand to the point where those resources could no longer sustain the societies' populations and subsequently collapsed. He shows, for example, how the fall of Rome has particular and vital importance for our modern global civilization. Destructive environmental behaviour today takes place on a much larger scale than ever before and the consequences will be correspondingly greater. Ponting argues for a higher sensitivity to the finite nature of our resources and the catastrophic impact on our modern world, should we continue to squander those resources.
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Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began
Jack Repcheck
Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun, and that the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours--nearly everyone then believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. A transcendent genius, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. During the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work--in fact, he kept it a secret, and the manuscript containing his theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things." It might never have been published if not for the enthusiasm of a young mathematician who journeyed hundreds of miles to meet him.--From publisher description.
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On Deep History and the Brain
Daniel Lord Smail
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. It lays out a new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
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A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
Dava Sobel
Traces the story of the reclusive sixteenth-century cleric who introduced the revolutionary idea that the Earth orbits the sun, describing the dangerous forces and complicated personalities that marked the publication of Copernicus's findings.
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Practicing History: Selected Essays
Barbara W. Tuchman
From thoughtful pieces on the historian's role to striking insights into America's past and present to trenchant observations on the international scene, Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. Here is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent "practicing history."
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The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
This is the absorbing story of Neil de Grasse Tyson's lifelong fascination with the night sky, a restless wonder that began some thirty years ago on the roof of his Bronx apartment building and eventually led him to become the director of the Hayden Planetarium. A unique chronicle of a young man who at one time was both nerd and jock, Tyson's memoir could well inspire other similarly curious youngsters to pursue their dreams.
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Naturalist
Edward O. Wilson
Edward O. Wilson—winner of two Pulitzer prizes, champion of biodiversity, and Faculty Emeritus at Harvard University—is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet his celebrated career began not with an elite education but from an insatiable curiosity about the natural world and drive to explore its mysteries. Called “one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written” by the Los Angeles Times, Naturalist is a wise and personal account of Wilson’s growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define. Wilson traces the trajectory of his life—from a childhood spent exploring the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida to life as a tenured professor at Harvard—detailing how his youthful fascination with nature blossomed into a lifelong calling. With humor and insight, Wilson recounts his days as a student at the University of Alabama and decades at Harvard University, where he has achieved renown as both teacher and researcher. As the narrative of Wilson's life unfolds, the reader is treated to an inside look at the origin and development of ideas that guide today's biological research. Theories that are now widely accepted in the scientific world were once untested hypotheses emerging from one man’s wide-ranging studies. At once practical and lyric, Naturalist provides fascinating insights into the making of a scientist, and a valuable look at some of the most thought-provoking ideas of our time.
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Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History
C. Vann Woodward
Examines how viewpoints have changed on the history of the south and explains the reasons for a reinterpretation of Southern history.
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Inventing American Religion
Robert Wuthnow
Today, a billion-dollar-a-year polling industry floods the media with information ... Polls tell us that 40 percent of Americans attend religious services each week. They show that African Americans are no more religious than white Americans, and that Jews are abandoning their religion in record numbers. According to leading sociologist Robert Wuthnow, none of that is correct. Pollsters say that attendance at religious services has been constant for decades. But during that time response rates in polls have plummeted, robotic 'push poll' calls have proliferated, and sampling has become more difficult. The accuracy of political polling can be known because elections actually happen. But there are no election results to show if the proportion of people who say they pray every day or attend services every week is correct. A large majority of the public doubts that polls can be trusted, and yet night after night on TV, polls experts sum up the nations habits to an eager audience of millions. Inventing American Religion offers a provocative new argument about the influence of polls in contemporary American society. Wuthnow contends that polls and surveys have shaped--and distorted--how religion is understood and portrayed in the media and also by religious leaders, practitioners, and scholars. He calls for a robust public discussion about American religion that extends well beyond the information provided by polls and surveys, and he suggests practical steps to facilitate such a discussion, including changes in how the results of polls and surveys are presented
