Product Description: As humans, death―its certainty, its inevitability―consumes us. We make it the subject of our literature, our art, our philosophy, and our religion. Our feelings and attitudes toward our mortality and its possible afterlives have evolved greatly from the early days of mankind...read more

Product Description: This brief narrative survey of political thought over the past two millennia explores key ideas that have shaped Western political traditions. Beginning with the Ancient Greeks' classical emphasis on politics as an independent sphere of activity, the book goes on to consider the medieval and early modern Christian views of politics and its central role in providing spiritual leadership...read more

Product Description: Globalization is the defining phenomenon of the twenty-first century and migration is the cornerstone of its economic and social force. Uncertain Identity examines international movements of peoples over the past sixty years to show what migration patterns have meant to the economic and social systems of countries around the world...read more

W.M. Spellman explores the past half century focusing on key topics such as human migration, science and technology, international business, religion and politics, and the break-up of Europe's overseas empires. Two central points of debate are examined: the struggle between centralized socialism and free-market capitalism and the interaction between the forces of cultural fragmentation and the competing integrative forces of "globalization" or world culture.

Product Description: This book interprets Western civilization broadly—continuing to discuss the Middle East beyond the confines of the ancient period. The chronologically organized narrative integrates political, social, economic, and intellectual history...read more

Product Description: This book interprets Western civilization broadly—continuing to discuss the Middle East beyond the confines of the ancient period. The chronologically organized narrative integrates political, social, economic, and intellectual history...read more

Product Description: Examining the varied causes of migration, and evaluating the historical impact of relocated peoples on their new homelands, this book focuses on the fate of migrants, the reasons for their relocation and their contributions to new cultural and environmental settings. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Provides brief biographies of seventy extraordinary women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ranging from Akka Mahadevi, an Indian saint and poet, to Katharina Zell, a German Protestant humanitarian. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The European seventeenth century saw the seeming resolution of two great conflicts: the nightmares of the Thirty Years War and the British civil wars, which established Catholicism as the dominant religion of Europe; and the growing power of the centralized state which enabled monarchs to hold the reins to even greater power at the cost of semi-democratic institutions...read more

Product Description: This book explores the influence of late seventeenth-century Christianity in Locke's philosophical, political, and educational thought. Only over the last decade have historians begun to investigate the central role played by religion in Locke's vision for individual autonomy and social responsibility...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Closely examining Locke's view of original sin and its consequences for education in the early Enlightenment, Spellman here argues that Locke was much closer to traditional Protestant teaching than is generally recognized, and challenges the interpretation that sees Locke as advocating, through his philosophical and educational writings, the perfectibility of humankind...read more