In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar John of Rupescissa sent a dramatic warning to his followers: the last days were coming; the apocalypse was near. Deemed insane by the Christian church, Rupescissa had spent more than a decade confined to prisons-in one case wrapped in chains and locked under a staircase-yet ill treatment could not silence the friar's apocalyptic message.Religious figures who preached the end times were hardly rare in the late Middle Ages...

Winner, 2024 Haskins Medal, Medieval Academy of AmericaWinner, 2023 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, History of Science SocietyWinner, 2022 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies, American Academy of ReligionHonorable Mention, 2023 John Boswell Prize, The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History (CLGBTH)Longlisted, 20...

Winner, 2024 Haskins Medal, Medieval Academy of AmericaWinner, 2023 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, History of Science SocietyWinner, 2022 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies, American Academy of ReligionHonorable Mention, 2023 John Boswell Prize, The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History (CLGBTH)Longlisted, 20...

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES BestsellerThe basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate HistoryNow includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee**’**s new book Song of the Cell!From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingen...

An "exciting" minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston ( The New York Times).On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in inco...

This fascinating story of madness reveals the radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day.Roy Porter explores what we really mean by 'madness', covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac.The origins of current debates about how we define and deal with insanity are examined through eyewitness accounts of those treating patients, w...

Paul is the most powerful human personality in the history of the Church. A missionary, theologian, and religious genius, in his epistles he laid the foundations on which later Christian theology was built.In his highly original introduction to Paul's life and thought, E. P. Sanders, whose research on Paul has substantially influenced recent scholarship, pays equal attention to Paul's fundamental convictions and the sometimes convoluted ways in which they were worked out.

Bart Ehrman--the New York Times bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus and a recognized authority on the early Christian Church--and Zlatko Plese here offer a groundbreaking, multi-lingual edition of the Apocryphal Gospels, one that breathes new life into the non-canonical texts that were once nearly lost to history. In The Apocryphal Gospels, Ehrman and Plese present a rare compilation of over 40 ancient gospel texts and textual fragments that do not appear in t...

In this engaging introduction to the New Testament, Professor Dale B. Martin presents a historical study of the origins of Christianity by analyzing the literature of the earliest Christian movements. Focusing mainly on the New Testament, he also considers nonbiblical Christian writings of the era.Martin begins by making a powerful case for the study of the New Testament. He next sets the Greco-Roman world in historical context and explains the place of Judaism within it. In the di...

WHAT IS IT THAT DRIVES THE SUCCESS OF AMERICA AND THE IDENTITY OF ITS PEOPLE? ACCLAIMED WRITER AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE JACK HITT THINKS IT’S BECAUSE WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF AMATEURS.America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages—fiddling with everything from solar-powered cars to space elevators. In Bunch of Amateurs, Jack Hitt visits a number of different garages and has written a fascinating boo...

After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government's efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations.In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these rad...