v. 1. "From world-renowned historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, the New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens, comes an exciting, brand-new illustrated book for middle-grade readers that looks at the early history of humankind. Even though we'll never outrun a hungry lion or outswim an angry shark, humans are pretty impressive-and we're the most dominant species on the planet. So how exactly did we become "unstoppable"? The answer to that is one of the strangest tales you'll ever hear. And it's a true story. From learning to make fire and using the stars as guides to cooking meals in microwaves and landing on the moon, prepare to uncover the secrets and superpowers of how we evolved from our first appearances millions of years ago. Acclaimed author Yuval Noah Harari has expertly crafted an extraordinary story of how humans learned to not only survive but also thrive on Earth, complete with maps, a timeline, and full-color illustrations that bring his dynamic, unputdownable writing to life"--

Separating truth from tall tales, this easy-to-read biography details the life of a great American frontiersman. Legends say Davy Crockett weighed two hundred pounds when he was born, and leapt right out of his cradle ready to fight. Though those stories are an exagerration, Crockett's life was anything but boring. Farmer, soldier, sharp-shooter and politician, he was a well-known figure in the early 1800s—and even after his death, his reputation as an American folk hero grew and grew. In this illustrated biography, David Adler retells the true story of David Crockett's life—from his birth in Tennessee to his death at the Alamo. Using contemporary primary sources, Adler distinguishes between fact and legend, providing details about Crockett's family life and political career, as well as a note about the historical origins of many of the famed tall tales. A timeline of important dates is included. For almost thirty years, David Adler’s Picture Book Biography series has profiled famous people who changed the world. Colorful, kid-friendly illustrations combine with Adler’s “expert mixtures of facts and personality” (Booklist) to introduce young readers to history through compelling biographies of presidents, heroes, inventors, explorers, and adventurers. These books are ideal for first and second graders interested in history or who need reliable sources for school book reports.

The Roman World 44 BC - AD 180 deals with the transformation of the Mediterranean regions, northern Europe and the Near East by the military autocrats who ruled Rome during this period. The book traces the impact of imperial politics on life in the city of Rome itself and in the rest of the empire, arguing that, despite long periods of apparent peace, this was a society controlled as much by fear of state violence as by consent. Martin Goodman examines the reliance of Roman emperors on a huge military establishment and the threat of force. He analyses the extent to which the empire functioned as a single political, economic and cultural unit and discusses, region by region, how much the various indigenous cultures and societies were affected by Roman rule. The book has a long section devoted to the momentous religious changes in this period, which witnessed the popularity and spread of a series of elective cults and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity from the complex world of first-century Judaea. This book provides a critical assessment of the significance of Roman rule for inhabitants of the empire, and introduces readers to many of the main issues currently faced by historians of the early empire. This new edition, incorporating the finds of recent scholarship, includes a fuller narrative history, expanded sections on the history of women and slaves and on cultural life in the city of Rome, many new illustrations, an updated section of bibliographical notes, and other improvements designed to make the volume as useful as possible to students as well as the general reader.

"The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. In the fiftieth anniversary edition of this now-classic book, Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony, he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed-just as cheese is made out of milk-and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." Ginzburg's massively influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In the preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio's story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller's story and Ginzburg's work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked. Menocchio's 500-year-old challenge to authority remains evocative and vital today"-- Provided by publisher.

"Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia... In this...book, Martin Goodman takes readers from Judaism's origins in the polytheistic world of the second and first millennia BCE to the temple cult at the time of Jesus. He tells the stories of the rabbis, mystics, and messiahs of the medieval and early modern periods and guides us through the many varieties of Judaism today."--Dust jacket flap.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."

"The first official White House videographer chronicles his time capturing behind-the-scenes moments of the president and his administrationFrom the early months of the 2008 campaign and through the first two and a half years of the Obama administration, Arun Chaudhary had a unique perspective on the president of the United States. "I'm sort of like President Obama's wedding videographer," he explains, "if every day was a wedding with the same groom but a constantly rotating set of hysterical guests."Some of the moments Chaudhary captures are small, like the president throwing warm-up pitches deep inside Busch Stadium in St. Louis before the All-Star game. Some are intensely emotional, as when Obama comforts a grieving teenager whose father had died in a devastating tornado. And some are just plain bizarre--like getting thrown out of the Indian parliament by his belt, or being trapped in a White House bathroom while Obama conducts a YouTube town hall on the other side of the door. Film and politics have been intertwined ever since the first Edison reels rattled in projection halls a century ago. But with the advent of new technologies and a new public that is hungry for images of their leaders, Chaudhary has been in the right place at the right time to participate in the interplay of film and politics at the very highest level. His entertaining and eye-opening book--which includes stories and images of key players such as Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, among others--gives readers a unique view of their government and their president in these historic and challenging times"--

A true-crime thriller -- the first book for teens to tell the nearly unknown tale of the brazen attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's body. Reissued in Scholastic Focus, with an exciting new cover. The action begins in October of 1875, as Secret Service agents raid the Fulton, Illinois, workshop of master counterfeiter Ben Boyd. Soon after Boyd is hauled off to prison, members of his counterfeiting ring gather in the back room of a smoky Chicago saloon to discuss how to spring their ringleader. Their plan: grab Lincoln's body from its Springfield tomb, stash it in the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, and demand, as a ransom, the release of Ben Boyd -- and $200,000 in cash. From here, the action alternates between the conspirators, the Secret Service agents on their trail, and the undercover agent moving back and forth between them. Along the way readers get glimpses into the inner workings of counterfeiting, grave robbing, detective work, and the early days of the Secret Service. The plot moves toward a wild climax as robbers and lawmen converge at Lincoln's tomb on election night: November 7, 1876.A dynamic and thrilling tale from critically acclaimed author Steve Sheinkin.

"In Hooked on Hollywood, Maltin opens up his personal archive to take readers on a fascinating journey through film history. He first interviewed greats of Hollywood as a precocious teenager in 1960s New York City. Early Maltin interviews had literally been stored in his garage for more than 40 years until GoodKnight Books brought them to light for the first time in this volume to entertain readers and inform future film scholars. In addition, key feature articles from Maltin's newsletter Movie Crazy are published here for the first time, providing new perspectives on the Warner Bros. classics Casablanca and Gold Diggers of 1933 as well as many other masterpieces--and bombs--from Hollywood history. Finally, Maltin looks back at what he considers Hollywood's "overlooked" studio, RKO Radio Pictures, which gave us such classics as King Kong and the many dance musicals of Astaire and Rogers. In Leonard's unique and witty style, he looks at dozens of obscure RKO features from the 1930s, including saucy pre-Codes, musicals, comedies, and mysteries. Leonard Maltin's love of movies and vast knowledge about their history shines through from the first page to the last in this unique volume, which includes 150 rare photos and a comprehensive index."--

First published in 1922 and based on lectures delivered in May 1921, Albert Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity offered an overview and explanation of the then new and controversial theory of relativity. The work would go on to become a monumental classic, printed in numerous editions and translations worldwide. Now, The Formative Years of Relativity introduces Einstein's masterpiece to new audiences. This beautiful volume contains Einstein's insightful text, accompanied by important historical materials and commentary looking at the origins and development of general relativity. Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn provide fresh, original perspectives, placing Einstein's achievements into a broader context for all readers. In this book, Gutfreund and Renn tell the rich story behind the early reception, spread, and consequences of Einstein's ideas during the formative years of general relativity in the late 1910s and 1920s. They show that relativity's meaning changed radically throughout the nascent years of its development, and they describe in detail the transformation of Einstein's work from the esoteric pursuit of one individual communicating with a handful of colleagues into the preoccupation of a growing community of physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers. This handsome edition quotes extensively from Einstein's correspondence and reproduces historical documents such as newspaper articles and letters

"A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz. In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city's famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap. Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black 'sporting world.' It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast. Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world--the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium"--

"This biography--perfect for middle-grade readers--tells the life story of Clarence Birdseye, the man who revolutionized the frozen food industry, and is adapted from Mark Kurlansky's adult work Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man. Adventurer and inventor Clarence Birdseye had a fascination with food preservation that led him to develop and patent the Birdseye freezing process and start the company that still bears his name today. His limitless curiosity spurred his other inventions, including the electric sunlamp, an improved incandescent lightbulb, and a harpoon gun to tag finback whales. This true story of an early entrepreneur is as thrilling as the story of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Includes an 8-page black-and-white photo insert"--

CARRIER STRIKEThe Battle of the Santa Cruz IslandsOctober 1942Eric HammelThe Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, a strategic naval action in the bitter Guadalcanal Campaign, was history's fourth carrier-versus-carrier naval battle. Though technically a Japanese victory, the battle proved to be the Empire of Japan's last serious attempt to win the Pacific War by means of an all-out carrier confrontation. Only one other carrier battle occurred in the Pacific War, in June 1944, in the Philippine Sea. By then, however, the U.S. Navy's Fast Carrier Task Force was operational, and Japan's dwindling fleet of carriers was outnumbered and completely outclassed. Though hundreds of Japanese naval aviators perished in the great Marianas Turkey Shoot of June 19-20, 1944, it was during the first four carrier battles-in the six-month period from early May through late October 1942-that the fate of Japan's small, elite naval air arm was sealed. It was at Coral Sea, in May, that Japan's juggernaut across the Pacific was blunted. It was at Midway, in June, that Japan's great carrier fleet was cut down to manageable size. And it was at Eastern Solomons, in August, and Santa Cruz, in October, that Japan's last best carrier air groups were ground to dust. After their technical victory at Santa Cruz, the Japanese withdrew their carriers from the South Pacific-and were never able to use them again as a strategically decisive weapon. Of the four Japanese aircraft carriers that participated in the Santa Cruz battle, only one survived the war. Following Santa Cruz and the subsequent series of air and surface engagements known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, the Imperial Navy's Combined Fleet never again attempted a meaningful strategic showdown with the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Though several subsequent surface actions in the Solomons were clearly Japanese victories, their results were short-lived. After November 1942, Japan could not again muster the staying power-or the willpower-to wage a strategic war with her navy. Once the veteran carrier air groups had been shredded at Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz, Japanese carriers ceased to be a strategic weapon. The Santa Cruz clash was deemed a Japanese victory because U.S. naval forces withdrew from the battlefield. That is how victory and defeat are strictly determined. But on the broader, strategic, level, the U.S. Navy won at Santa Cruz-because it was able to achieve its strategic goal of holding the line and buying time. Japan was unable to achieve her strategic goal of defeating the U.S. Pacific Fleet in a final, decisive, all-or-nothing battle. The technical victory cost Japan any serious hope she had of winning the Pacific naval war. The "victory" at Santa Cruz cost Japan her last best hope to win the war in the Pacific. Once again, author-historian Eric Hammel brings to the reading public an exciting narrative filled with the latest information and written in the edge-of-the-seat style that his readers have enjoyed for nearly two decades, in nearly thirty acclaimed military history books. As was the case with its companion volume, Carrier Clash, this new book is based upon American and Japanese battle reports and the recollections of many airmen and seamen who took part. Eric Hammel is the author of forty combat history books.

An inside look at America’s largest newspaper— The Wall Street Journal ”Phillips offers fascinating insights about American business, politics, and journalism. He traveled in the circles of CEOs, U.S. presidents, prime ministers, and royalty; always at his core he was a reporter. That is the beauty of Newspaperman .” —Vernon E. Jordan Jr., civil rights leader; senior managing director, Lazard Freres & Company; adviser to President Bill Clinton “[Phillips] captures the fabulous stories of a scrawny, precocious boy from reporter to publisher and then CEO, participating in and then presiding over the Journal ’s years of greatest growth.” —Joan Konner, Dean Emerita, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism “Phillips fell in love with newspapers when he was a boy. He’s still infatuated but he doesn’t skip over his tough times or mistakes. That’s what makes Newspaperman such a telling guide to the newsroom and to the top office in the executive suite.” —Lou Boccardi, former president and chief executive, Associated Press; former chairman, Pulitzer Prize Board “This lovely book recounts the life of a wise, thoughtful, and admired newspaper editor and publisher. The tiny Wall Street Journal Warren Phillips joined grew up to be a giant. Newspaperman tells that story.” —Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive, The Washington Post Company “[Phillips provides] perceptive commentaries on Germany, Greece, Turkey, England, Spain, China, Russia, and the Middle East. All is told with modest good humor, but repeatedly emphasizes the need for integrity and high standards.” —George B. Munroe, retired chairman and chief executive, Phelps Dodge Corporation “The story of a boy born in Brooklyn, a reporter, an editor, a publisher, a corporate executive, and now the author of a fascinating book.” —James Q. Riordan, former vice chairman, Mobil Corporation “In spite of a few hiccups, honestly related here, Dow Jones was rated by Fortune magazine as the second most-admired company in the United States, and so proved that an outstanding newspaperman can also achieve enormous success as a business builder and leader.” —Hamish Maxwell, former chairman and CEO, Philip Morris Companies Inc. “A memoir from a man who helped transform The Wall Street Journal from a local newspaper to a global operation.. . . Throughout the book, Phillips looks at his part in shaping the Journal ’s news and editorial coverage, and these sections provide insight into his highly successful methods. The author includes many anecdotes culled from his diaries, some very funny, which illustrate the variegated aspects of his life and the people who shared in it.. . . A well-rounded autobiography about the journalism industry and the people who shaped the news over the past 50 years.” —Kirkus Reviews “The sections about the rise of the Wall Street Journal 's quality and influence are fascinating - for journalists and non-journalists alike.” — Philadelphia Inquirer ”Phillips provides an arresting retrospective on modern world history that general readers will find informative and delightful.” — Star-Telegram About the Book When Warren Phillips was eleven years old, his father took him on a guided tour of the New York Daily News , where he got his first look at the frenzied yet surprisingly ordered and controlled world of newspaper publishing. He saw everything from the industrial printing presses churning out newspapers at astonishing speeds to reporters hunched over their typewriters, writing the very stories those presses would be producing within hours—or even minutes. Phillips was hooked. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Newspaperman tells the story of how an immigrant’s shy son from Queens, New York, rose to the top of his industry powered by little more than passion, brains, and hard work. Phillips began his career working as a copyboy for the New York Herald Tribune for sixteen dollars a week—and ended it as publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent corporation, Dow Jones & Company. The life story of Warren Phillips is the story of the American newspaper business. Here, the details of his vast experience come together to create a broad picture of the newspaper business— revealing how news is discovered, reported, edited, published, and disseminated. Sharing vivid tales of working as a reporter around the world and describing the many colorful characters he meets along the way, Phillips provides a level of insight that only a leading figure in the industry could offer. Newspaperman gives you an up-close look at one of the most influential people in the history of The Wall Street Journal —and an unprecedented view of the business, from its rapid modernization during the post–WWII , cold war era to the early years of digital publishing and the rise of the Internet, which may mark the decline of the printed page forever. Phillips’s entertaining, penetrating, and impressively detailed account is a must-read for both devotees of America’s most iconic business publication and anyone with an interest in how news is reported.

In this concluding volume of James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II: The Damascus Code, the Tent of David, the New Covenant, and the Blood of Christ, renowned biblical scholar Robert Eisenman compresses in a more reader-friendly format the results of previous work, creating a more comprehensive picture of Jesus' brother James as "the pivotal Opposition Leader" of the time leading up to the War against Rome (66-70 CE). Is there an interconnecting code between the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls? Eisenman - who broke the Scrolls monopoly and was the first to identify the so-called "James Ossuary" as fraudulent - shows that there is. Moreover, in this newly-revised volume, he 'decodes' many beloved and famous sayings of the Gospels, such as "Every plant which My Heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted," "A man shall not be known by what goes into his mouth but by what comes out of it," "Do not throw Holy Things to dogs," etc. including chapters like "The Dogs who Licked Poor Lazarus' Sores" or "Rabbi Eliezer's Bad Breath and Lazarus' Stinking Body." In identifying the Scrolls as the literature of "the Messianic Movement in Palestine"; he not only connects "James the Brother of Jesus" to the Leadership of 'Early Christianity' in Palestine, but also to "the Righteous Teacher" in the Scrolls. Offering a point-by-point analysis of James' relationship to the Habakkuk Commentary, The Damascus Document, The War Scroll, etc., he also illumines the subjects "the Pella Flight and raising the Fallen Tent of David," "Paul as an Herodian," "the Wilderness Camps," and "Peter"'s role as "a prototypical Essene" but in Acts as a mouthpiece for anti-Semitism. In doing so he, not only clarifies the true history of Palestine in the First Century, but deciphers the way 'the picture' of "Jesus" was put together in the Gospels and, as a consequence, what can be known about the real "Jesus." He also covers subjects like "the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus" and Paul's attack on James on the Temple steps, extending it to the competition between Paul and "the Party of James" over "Circumcision" in Antioch and the conversion of Queen Helen Adiabene and her sons in Northern Syria, who led the "famine relief" effort ascribed to Paul in Acts. Moreover, he will show the figure of James to have been so influential and highly-regarded in the Jerusalem of his day that his death was the capstone event leading up to the Jewish Revolt against Rome. In making these arguments and exposing actual 'overwrites', a crucial new point that emerges is his identification of the Qumran document called by scholars "MMT" as a 'Jamesian' Letter to "the Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates." At the same time, he unravels the real "code" behind the pivotal New Testament allusion: "This is the Cup of the New Covenant in My Blood," connecting it to "the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus" and "giving the Cup of the Right Hand of the Lord ( "the Cup of Divine Wrath") to drink" in both the Damascus Document and Habakkuk Pesher in the Scrolls. Did Paul know the meaning of the famous Damascus Document (discovered in Cairo in the Nineteenth Century) "to set the Holy Things up according to their precise specifications" - or the reverse of it, as Peter is presented as being made to understand by "a Voice out of Heaven" and "a Tablecloth" descending out of it - "to make no distinctions between Holy and profane" - on a rooftop in Gaza? In this series, Eisenman's revelations will extend far beyond these examples. James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both I and II, will complete the task of rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was cast, either intentionally or via benign neglect. His conclusion will, therefore, definitively bear on the problem of "the Historical Jesus" "Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus." Eisenman's many readers will not be disappointed.

Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.

"Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism tells the history of Early American Jews, focusing on the objects of everyday life used and created by Jews, such as ritual baths, food, gravestones, portraits, furniture, as well as the synagogue. By uncovering these objects and exposing the common culture of the Jewish Atlantic world, the book provides a fresh understanding of a crucial era in Jewish and American history. It offers new insights about the origins of Jewish American messianism, helping readers better understand messianism in contemporary American society. It charts the shared culture of these Jews who lived in the port towns in the Caribbean and on both sides of the Atlantic, and author Laura Arnold Leibman argues that thinking about Judaism as an embodied religion is key to understanding their culture. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism makes early Jewish American history entertaining, accessible, and interesting to general readers, as well as to academic audiences." -- Publisher's website.

The Bible took shape over the course of centuries, and today Christian groups continue to disagree over details of its contents. The differences among these groups typically involve the Old Testament, as they mostly accept the same 27-book New Testament. An essential avenue for understanding the development of the Bible are the many early lists of canonical books drawn up by Christians and, occasionally, Jews. Despite the importance of these early lists of books, they have remained relatively inaccessible. This comprehensive volume redresses this unfortunate situation by presenting the early Christian canon lists all together in a single volume. The canon lists, in most cases, unambiguously report what the compilers of the lists considered to belong to the biblical canon. For this reason they bear an undeniable importance in the history of the Bible. The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity provides an accessible presentation of these early canon lists. With a focus on the first four centuries, the volume supplies the full text of the canon lists in English translation alongside the original text, usually Greek or Latin, occasionally Hebrew or Syriac. Edmon L. Gallagher and John D. Meade orient readers to each list with brief introductions and helpful notes, and they point readers to the most significant scholarly discussions. The book begins with a substantial overview of the history of the biblical canon, and an entire chapter is devoted to the evidence of biblical manuscripts from the first millennium. This authoritative work is an indispensable guide for students and scholars of biblical studies and church history.

What did "freedom of the press" really mean to the framers of the First Amendment and their contemporaries? This masterful book by a Pulitzer Prize–winning constitutional historian answers that question. In Emergence of a Free Press (a greatly revised and enlarged edition of his landmark Legacy of Suppression), Leonard W. Levy argues that the First Amendment was not designed to be the bulwark of a free press that many thought, nor had the amendment's framers intended to overturn the common law of seditious libel that was the principal means of stifling political dissent. Yet he notes how robust and rambunctious the early press was, and he takes that paradox into account in tracing the succession of cases and reforms that figured in the genesis of a free press. Mr. Levy's brilliant account offers a new generation of readers a penetrating look into the origins of one of America's most cherished freedoms.

This is a reissue of a critical introduction to the novels of Virginia Woolf, first published in 1977. It makes close, illuminating readings of her nine novels, placing Woolf in her literary context and providing an accessible, clear and valuable guide for students starting out on a study of Woolf as a novelist, and for general readers seeking a fresh, helpful entry-point to the challenge of reading Woolf. Twenty years later, Hermione Lee wrote a prize-winning and acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf: this critical study represented an early stage in this biographer-criticâe(tm)s life-long interest and involvement with Woolfâe(tm)s life and work.