A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughsA forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Use...

Prostitution will be studied in these pages from the standpoint of the practical experience of European countries. An effort will be made to ascertain its forms and extent, the sources from which it is recruited, the conditions that either cause or conduce to it, the procedure of different communities in dealing with it and with the conditions responsible for it, the measures which have been employed by way of combat or control, and the results which have been thus obtained. Material will ...

Originally published in 1930. Flexiner’s Universities was the big book on higher education when it was first published in 1930 and continued to be such until the appearance of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ The Higher Learning in America in 1936. Universities continues to be one of the great books in the field more than sixty years later・but for quite different reasons now than then.

History of three wars from the reign of Justinian, Byzantine emperor -- The Persian War, The Vandalic War, and The Gothic War. According to Wikipedia: "Procopius of Caesarea (Latin: Procopius Caesarensis, c. AD 500 – c. AD 565) was a prominent Byzantine scholar from Palestine. Accompanying the general Belisarius in the wars of the Emperor Justinian I, he became the principal historian of the 6th century, writing the Wars of Justinian, the Buildings of Justinian and the celebrated Secret Hi...

Mommsen's history of the Roman Republic in five volumes. These volumes cover from the founding of Rome up to the disintegration of the First Triumvirate (Caesar, Pompey, Crassus). The author cites dates in the Roman style, AUC, from the founding of the city in 753 BC. A table at the end shows modern-day equivalents. According to Wikipedia, Mommsen is "generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century." This work complements Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (AD56 - AD117) was a Roman orator, lawyer and senator. He is considered one of antiquities greatest historians. The surviving portions of his major works - "The Histories" and "The Annals" - examine the reigns of the Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the "Year of the Four Emperors". These two works cover the span of history from the death of Augustus in AD14 to the death of Domitian in 96AD - although much of the later material is lost to ...

Vegetius's De re militari is the most influential military treatise to survive from late antiquity, a disciplined compendium of Roman martial practice, recruitment, training, camp construction, tactics, siegecraft, and naval warfare. Written in a terse, admonitory Latin prose, it looks backward to the perceived rigor of the republican and early imperial legions while addressing the military anxieties of a weakened later empire. Its literary mode is both technical manual and moral exhortati...

Translation based on W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn, 1869 The Gallic Wars were a series of military campaigns waged by the Roman proconsul Julius Caesar against several Gallic tribes, lasting from 58 BC to 51 BC. The Romans would also raid Britannia and Germania, but these expeditions never developed into full-scale invasions. The Gallic Wars culminated in the decisive Battle of Alesia in 52 BC, in which a complete Roman victory resulted in the expansion of the Roman Republic over the whol...

Herodotus was an Ancient Greek Historian from the 5th Century BC, whose only known work "The Histories" is so wonderfully written and constructed - and so crucial to our understanding of that era, that he has become known as the 'Father of History'."The Histories" is a sprawling text that contains Herodotus' inquiries and explanations of the Greco-Persian wars, as well as an incredible wealth of geographical and ethnographical information about the various cultures and creeds of th...

The Germania (Latin: De Origine et situ Germanorum, lit. The Origin and Situation of the Germans), written by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus around 98, is an ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire.This work survived only in one single manuscript that was found in Hersfeld Abbey, Holy Roman Empire and brought to Italy in 1455 where Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the later Pope Pius II, first examined and analyzed it, whereby he sparked interest among German humanists such as C...

A clazzic work of military history, this was the first systematic study of the auxiliary soldiers who fought alongside the Roman legions. Using evidence ranging from their gravestones to the discharge papers that eventually granted them citizenship, Cheesman traces the evolution of the “barbarian” auxiliaries, from ad-hoc local levies to highly specialized units that became a vital component of the Roman army. Separate chapters cover the size and organization of auxiliary units; where and ...

Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) is one of the most famous men in history, and his name was used to denote the status of emperor throughout European countries like Italy, Germany, and Russia nearly 2,000 years after his famous assassination. But before he won the civil war against Pompey the Great and ended the Roman Republic permanently, he became a man of power and fame in modern day France, leading armies in the Gallic campaign. Moreover, Caesar wrote extensively about the campaign, giving r...