"In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational--in fringe--is on the rise: from Atlantis to aliens, from Flat Earth to the Loch Ness monster, the list goes on. It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures. Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity...

"By the world-renowned seismologist, a surprising history of natural disasters, their impact on our culture, and new ways of thinking about the ones to come. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes--these all stem from the same forces that give our planet life. It is only when they exceed our ability to withstand them that they become disasters. Viewed together, these events have shaped our cities and their architecture; elevated leaders and...

"Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there's drink there's drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. It can be religious, it can be sexual, it can be the duty of kings or the relief of peasants. It can be an offering to the ancestors, or a way of marking the end of a day's work. It can send you to sleep, or send you into battle. A Brief History of Drunkenness traces humankind's love affair...

"Soon to be a PBS Masterpiece series starring Samantha Bond (Downton Abbey) and Francesca Annis (Cranford). Away from the frontlines of World War II, in towns and villages across Great Britain, ordinary women were playing a vital role in their country's war effort. As members of the Women's Institute, an organization with a presence in a third of Britain's villages, they ran canteens and knitted garments for troops, collected tons of rosehips and...

"The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here...

"Nineteenth-century Britons experienced an astonishing and unprecedented series of changes. Cities swelled to previously unimaginable sizes, there were great leaps forward in science and technology that, when coupled with a growing religious skepticism, rendered the intellectual landscape increasingly unrecognizable. Most of the countries in the world that experienced these changes were racked by political and social unrest. However, Britain maintained...

Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons...

A history of the post-World War II decades traces the efforts of an activist federal government to guide the U.S. toward a realization of the American Dream, exploring the era's unprecedented economic, social, and environmental growth. --Publisher. "In The Gifted Generation, a fresh interpretation of post-World War II America, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after the war. He argues that the federal government was instrumental...