In easy-to-understand language, former NASA special projects engineer Robert Alston tackles cosmology's profoundest questions: Where did the universe come from, and how were its laws and constants finely tuned to allow for life? From Albert Einstein's biggest blunder to the perfect parameters that allow fragile life to persevere, this mini-book explores how astronomy and physics point to a cosmic architect.

Are life and the universe a mindless accident—the blind outworking of cosmic, chemical, and biological evolution? That's the official story many of us were taught somewhere along the way. But what does the science actually say? Drawing on recent discoveries in astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, biology, and paleontology, Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell shows how the latest scientific evidence suggests a very different story.

White on White/Black on Black is a unique contribution to the philosophy of race. The book explores how fourteen philosophers, seven white and seven black, philosophically understand the dynamics of the process of racialization. Combined, the contributions demonstrate different and similar conceptual trajectories of raced identities that emerge from within and across the racial divide. Each of the fourteen philosophers, who share a textual space of exploration, name black...

By 1900, the German population in the United States was close to 2.7 million. In numerous cities in the Northeast and Midwest, those who had immigrated in the nineteenth century congregated in demarcated ethnic neighborhoods—"little Germanies." This was not the case of the German immigrant community in Charleston, South Carolina. The establishment and evolution of the nineteenth-century German immigrant community there was as unique as the southern Lowcountry city itself.Early Germ...

Theodosia Burr Alston left Charleston, South Carolina in December 1812 bound for New York and a visit with her father. Aaron Burr had only recently returned from France. Theodosia had only recently lost a baby. The schooner Patriot was filled with grain and a single passenger on board. Somewhere off the coast of North Carolina the small ship was lost. My e-book looks at conflicting weather reports for the weeks before and after December 30, 1812. One of them records a major storm that rage...

COMMON BLOOD sets the experiences of an extended family of post-Colonial English and German immigrants against the backdrop of more than eighty years of Charlestons tumultuous nineteenth-century history. For the reader who appreciates that history does indeed repeat itself, and who finds social, cultural, and political history fascinating in its ability to provide a vision of both the past and the future, the family stories narrated here are eminently illustrative of the intersection of in...