Mystery cults are one of the most intriguing areas of Greek and Roman religion. In the nocturnal mysteries at Eleusis, participants dramatically reenacted the story of Demeter's loss and recovery of her daughter Persephone; in the Bacchic cult, bands of women ran wild in the Greek countryside to honor Dionysus; in the mysteries of Mithras, men came to understand the nature of the universe and their place within it through frightening initiation ceremonies and astrological teachings.

Heinrich Himmler was an unremarkable looking man. Yet he was Hitler's top enforcer, in charge of the Gestapo, the SS, and the so-called Final Solution. We can only wonder, as biographer Peter Longerich asks, how could such a banal personality attain such a historically unique position of power? How could the son of a prosperous Bavarian Catholic public servant become the organizer of a system of mass murder spanning the whole of Europe?In the first comprehensive biography of this m...

Centuries Will Not Suffice explores how different people responded to the Lithuanian Holocaust and the roles that they played. It considers the past history of the perpetrators and those who took great risks to save Jews, as well as describing the experiences of many who were caught up in the maelstrom.Unlike the figures at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, the men who were responsible for these killings have been largely forgotten. Karl Jäger was a senior SS figure who was i...

A twisty, dark royalcore fantasy that takes the courtly intrigue of Hamlet and infuses it with the vicious ambition of the Boleyn family. For readers who love Holly Black and Sarah J. Maas.Marry the prince, then kill him.Princess Madalina and her twin sister, Inessa, were born attached at the hand and separated right after. That’s the only time the sisters ever held hands. The girls’ personalities have been shaped in the Sinet family’s drive to mak...

**The intimate, inspiring memoir of a “curator extraordinaire” (The Guardian)—part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part insider’s tour of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live a life driven by curiosity, conversation, and coincidence“A few years ago, ArtReview named him the most powerful figure in the field, but Obrist . . . seems less to stand atop the art world than to race around, up, over, and through it*.”—The New Yorker***...

At the edge of the world, unknown and unseen, he endures and survives even in our digital era . . .A young man leaves his backdoor Russian town and heads to Moscow, never to be poor again. With each day, he grows more and more desperate until he meets an old geologist with an intriguing and surprisingly profitable offer: to join him on his trip to the depths of Siberia, the largest forest on the planet, and become a "black digger"—one of those who find and excavate...

This collection of seventeen original essays reshapes the field of early American legal history not by focusing simply on law, or even on the relationship between law and society, but by using the concept of “legality” to explore the myriad ways in which the people of early America ordered their relationships with one another, whether as individuals, groups, classes, communities, or states.Addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, family, patriarchy, culture, and dependence, contribu...

Fairy tale fans will give a GIANT cheer for this funny retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk from the New York Times Bestselling author of Rump and Red!All his life, Jack has longed for an adventure, so when giants turn up in the neighbor's cabbage patch, he is thrilled! Soon Jack is chasing them to a land beyond the clouds, with his little sister, Annabella, in tow. The kingdom of giants is full of super-sized fun: puddings to swim in, spo...

We may think of "globalism" as a recent development but its origins date back to the fifteenth century and beyond, when seafarers pioneered routes across the oceans with the objectives of exploration, trade, and profit. These voyages only became possible after certain technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping—enabled navigation across unprecedented distances. The mariners' embarkation points were the vibrant ports of the West—Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon—and th...

Rigorous, practical, and deeply reverent, Divine Providence speaks to the struggles of believers today as it tackles difficult questions with biblical truth. Does God govern the world—and how? Is he the author of sin? Why do good people suffer while bad people thrive? What does God's providence mean for how we should live our lives?In a masterful discourse, Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock arms us to trust in the One who works all things for his glory and the good of th...

Raised in 1943 with seventeen-year-olds from the Hitler Youth movement, and following the twin disasters of Stalingrad and "Tunisgrad", the Hitlerjugend Panzer Division emerged as the most effective German division fighting in the West. The core of the division was a cadre of offices and NCOs provided by Hitler's bodyguard division, the elite Leibstandarte, with the aim of producing a division of "equal value" to fight alongside them in I SS Panzer Corps.During th...

The Titanic. The Britannic. The Olympic. They are some of the most famous ships in history, but for the wrong reasons.The Olympic Class liners were conceived as the largest, grandest ships ever to set sail. Of the three ships built, the first only lost the record for being the largest because she was beaten by the second, and they were both beaten by the third. The class was meant to secure the White Star Line's reputation as the greatest...