We've all asked, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the past was much worse. Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: genocides in the Old Testament, gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm, monarchs who beheaded their relatives, and American founders who dueled with their rivals. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were common features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished. How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? Pinker argues that thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.

"There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the twentieth century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other has killed none. Jeffrey Masson's fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In his previous bestsellers, Masson has showed that animals can teach us much about our own emotions--love (dogs), contentment (cats), grief (elephants), among others. But animals have much to teach us about negative emotions such as anger and aggression as well, and in unexpected ways. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species. We are least human, we think, when we succumb to our primitive, animal ancestry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Animals, at least predators, kill to survive, but there is nothing in the annals of animal aggression remotely equivalent to the violence of mankind. Our burden is that humans, and in particular humans in our modern industrialized world, are the most violent animals to our own kind in existence, or possibly ever in existence on earth. We lack what all other animals have: a check on the aggression that would destroy the species rather than serve it. It is here, Masson says, that animals have something to teach us about our own history. In Beasts, he strips away our misconceptions of the creatures we fear, offering a powerful and compelling look at our uniquely human propensity toward aggression"--

A history of American domestic violence.

This globe-spanning history of sugar is "an epic story on a broad canvas that never loses sight of individual moments of human drama; a historical methodology infused with political, intellectual, cultural, and social strands; a complex sequence of cause and effect; an illuminating synthesis of primary and secondary sources; and a thoughtful marriage of words, picture, and design." (Horn Book starred review) Here is the story of how one product allows us to see the grand currents of world history in new ways. Using songs, oral histories, maps, and over 80 archival illustrations, Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos put a human face on this vast pageant. Time line, source notes, bibliography, and index included. The history of sugar runs like a bright band from religious ceremonies in India to Europe's Middle Ages, then on to Columbus, who brought the first cane cuttings to the Americas. Sugar caused the loss of countless lives, but it also planted the seeds of revolution that led to freedom in the American colonies, Haiti, and France. Cane, not cotton or tobacco, drove the bloody Atlantic slave trade and took the lives of countless Africans who toiled on vast sugar plantations under cruel overseers. And yet the very popularity of sugar gave abolitionists in England the one tool that could finally end the slave trade. Sugar moved, murdered, and freed millions; sugar changed the world.

For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subverison, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant'ssupport for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. "Redemption" is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875. Lemann bases his devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable papers of Adelbert Ames, the war hero from Maine who was Mississippi's governor at the time. When Ames pleaded with Grant for federal troops who could thwart the white terrorists violently disrupting Republican political activities, Grant wavered, and the result was a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was "redeemed"--that is, returned to white control. """Redemption "makes clear that this is what led to the death of Reconstruction--and of the rights encoded in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.

Chronicles the human drama and tragedy of events in contemporary Chile in light of fourteen years of brutal dictatorship

"Through analyses of three eventful years in Nazi Germany's history, this book offers a new account of the phenomenon of extreme state violence as a special category of violence, in which the armed forces are used unnecessarily and excessively, often on thin pretexts, and only rarely with the intention of carrying a message to the public"--

While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Martha Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Since long before the 2002 Gujarat riots--in which nearly two thousand Muslims were killed by Hindu extremists--the power of the Hindu right has been growing, threatening India's hard-won constitutional practices of democracy, tolerance, and religious pluralism. Led politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu right has sought the subordination of other religious groups and has directed particular vitriol against Muslims, who are cast as devils in need of purging. The Hindu right seeks to return to a "pure" India, unsullied by alien polluters of other faiths, yet the BJP's defeat in recent elections demonstrates the power that India's pluralism continues to wield. The future, however, is far from secure, and Hindu extremism and exclusivity remain a troubling obstacle to harmony in South Asia. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history. Ultimately she argues that the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilizations, as some believe, but from a clash within each of us, as we oscillate between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others. India's story is a cautionary political tale for all democratic states striving to act responsibly in an increasingly dangerous world.

This book, by a renowned and distinguished historian, is an arresting account of the role that resentment has played throughout history, from Antiquity and early Christianity through to the present day. At the origin of resentment we always find an injury, an act of humiliation, an affront, a trauma. Those who feel victimized cannot react because they are powerless. They brood on their desire for revenge, which they cannot satisfy but which constantly nags at them. Until finally they explode with anger. This period of waiting may also be accompanied by a repudiation of the oppressor's values and a rehabilitation of the victim's own values, and this gives the oppressed new strength, fuelling the act of revolt or revenge. Ferro effortlessly weaves together historical examples such as the role played by resentment in the French and Russian revolutions, the resentment against the historical suffering of African Americans that underpinned the civil rights movement and the rise of black power, and the revival of resentment by proponents of radical Islam whose violent acts of terror in New York, London and elsewhere have shaken the world.

Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Avital Ronell examines the diverse figures of finitude in our modernity: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, electronic tagging, rumor. Her essays address such questions as, How do rumors kill? How has video become the conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even where they are not? Is peace possible? “[W]riting to the community of those who have no community—to those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment,” her work explores the possibility, one possibility among many, that “this time we have gone too far”: “One last word. It is possible that we have gone too far. This possibility has to be considered if we, as a species, as a history, are going to get anywhere at all.”

In this disturbing book Marc Ellis, whom Rosemary Ruether has described as perhaps the most important contemporary Jewish theologian, examines the way in which religion has often been associated with violence, repression, war and vengeance. The book begins with the massacre in Hebron in 1994, perpetrated by a religious Jew, and the assasination of Yitzhak Rabin casts a long shadow over it. The first chapter enters into dialogue with these facts and trevals the world of Holocaust thought and theology. The second chapter explores the evolving world of Christianity after the Holocaust as a possible response to suffering in the contemporary world. Then two chapters join the search in Holocaust theology and liberation theology which seek to renew the core of Judaism and Christianirt, or alter that core through feminist and indigenous insights. Chapter five seeks to find a path beyond atrocity. The topic of this book is one which Marc Ellis has wrestled with for most of his adult life, and he has spent many years working with and travelling among the poor, most often in the company of committed Christians in different areas of the world. This lends his writing enormous power and conviction, and this work is not one that will easily be forgotten. Marc H. Ellis has taught at Maryknoll School of Theology and Florida State University, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.