Focusing on twenty-first century Western films, including all major releases since the turn of the century, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of aesthetic and thematic aspects explored in these films, including gender and race. As diverse contributors focus on the individual subgenres of the traditional Western (the gunfighter, the Cavalry vs. Native American conflict, the role of women in Westerns, etc.), they share an understanding of the twenty-first century Western may be u...

Why society needs to reclaim the power to create moneyAt the heart of capitalism lies the ability of private banks to create money at the stroke of a key. Why have we ignored this unique privilege for so long – and at what cost? Aaron Sahr attributes the lack of attention paid to money creation to the core of popular theories of capitalism, which equate economic power with capital ownership. This conceptual framework obscures the real drivers of capitalist dynamics...

This groundbreaking volume explores the importance of economics and prosperity throughout Samuel Clemens’s writing and personal life.Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture focuses on an overlooked feature of the story of one of America’s most celebrated writers. Investigating Samuel Clemens’s often conflicting but insightful views on the roles of money in American culture and identity, this collection of essays shows how his fascination with ...

Historians have mainly seen the ghettos established by the Nazis in German-occupied Eastern Europe as spaces marked by brutality, tyranny, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population. Drawing on examples from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, Dance on the Razor’s Edge explores how, in fact, highly improvised legal spheres emerged in these coerced and heterogeneous ghetto communities.Looking at sources from multiple archives and countries, Svenja Bethke investigat...

Humans are the most intelligent beings this planet has ever produced. But how is it that we can travel into space, cure diseases and decode the fundamentals of life, and at the same time find ourselves faced with an existential crisis that threatens to overwhelm us? What lies behind this uncharacteristic failure to master the most important challenge of our existence?In this compelling book, the leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and the journalist Thomas Trappe investigate ...

Conspiracy theories seem to be proliferating today. Long relegated to a niche existence, conspiracy theories are now pervasive, and older conspiracy theories have been joined by a constant stream of new ones – that the USA carried out the 9/11 attacks itself, that the Ukrainian crisis was orchestrated by NATO, that we are being secretly controlled by a New World Order that keep us docile via chemtrails and vaccinations. Not to mention the moon landing that never happened.But what a...

Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We’re converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects – houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on – now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. ...

Humans are the most intelligent beings this planet has ever produced. But how is it that we find ourselves faced with an existential crisis that threatens to overwhelm us?Leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe investigate what DNA can tell us about how we got where we are and what our future might be. They show how the first humans were defeated again and again and suffered fatal setbacks, and how Homo sapiens succeeded in conquering continents, over...

A Westerner’s travels among the persecuted and displaced Christian remnant in Iraq and Syria teach him much about faith under fire.Gold Medal Winner, 2018 IPPY Book of the Year AwardSilver Medal Winner, 2018 Benjamin Franklin AwardFinalist, 2018 ECPA Christian Book AwardInside Syria and Iraq, and even along the refugee trail, they’re a religious minority persecuted for their C...