"Before Ibsen, tragedies examined the lives of the aristocracy and upper classes, but A Doll's House was the first serious play to be written in prose about ordinary people in everyday situations. The plot revolves around Nora Helmer who is married to Torvald, an ambitious banker. Initially, the couple seem ideally matched, but as a consequence of blackmail Nora is forced to re-examine her life along with her role as a frivolous, scatter-brained wife."--p....

In this book, the author, a medieval historian presents a compelling picture of daily life in the Middle Ages as it was experienced by ordinary people. He describes how these vulnerable people confronted life, from birth to death, including childhood, marriage, work, sex, food, illness, religion, and the natural world. While most histories of the period focus on the ideas and actions of the few who wielded power and stress how different medieval people...

"In the humane tradition of Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers comes a searing account of the international refugee crisis"--Amazon.com. "On the day of his son's fourteenth birthday, Hashem al-Souki lay somewhere in the Mediterranean, crammed in a wooden dinghy. His family was relatively safe -- at least for the time being -- in Egypt, where they had only just settled after fleeing their war-torn Damascus home three years prior. Traversing...

This book looks at the origins of the bubonic plague that ravaged the medieval world in the late 1340s and traces its march through Europe as it killed one third of the population.

Story of the Roma, commonly referred to as Gypsies, a people who have been both romanticized and vilified in popular culture. The Roma have endured centuries of intolerance and persecution in Europe, most notably the Holocaust genocide where an estimated 500,000 were murdered. A People Uncounted documents their culturally rich yet often difficult lives, and demonstrates how their present state has been deeply shaped by the tragedies of the past. Filmed...

This set of twenty-four lectures examines aspects of elite and popular culture in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, focusing on the way in which men and women seeking to explain, order, and escape the terrors of their lives embraced transcendental religious experiences, dreamed of and worked for the coming of the apocalypse, and seized on a widespread belief in witchcraft and Satanism.

"A major new book by New York Times bestselling author and geopolitical forecaster George Friedman (The Next 100 Years, The Next Decade) with a bold thesis about coming conflict in the world, this provocative work examines the geopolitical flashpoints, particularly in Europe, in which imminent future conflicts are brewing. George Friedman has forecasted the coming trends (politics, technology, population, and culture) of the next century in The Next...

Franklin Roosevelt was the first great hero of American Jews. FDR's promise of economic and social justice was consonant with the mainstays of Jewish culture and with the ethos of the Old Testament and the prophets. And of course, these themes were especially resonant during the desperate days of the Great Depression. The Jews who so deeply admired Roosevelt made up the richest, most influential Jewish community in the world, leaders in government,...

This book is not only an analysis of demographic and political realities in Europe, but also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes reporting from across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who appear to welcome them in to the places which cannot accept them.