Themes of the American Civil War offers a timely and useful guide to this vast topic for a new generation of students. The volume provides a broad-ranging assessment of the causes, complexities, and consequences of America’s most destructive conflict to date. The essays, written by top scholars in the field, and reworked for this...

The presidency of Ronald Reagan has become a Rorschach Test for politicians and citizens alike. Conservatives see the Reagan era as the high-water mark for their movement, in much the same way that many progressives view FDR's presidency as the pinnacle of liberalism. Liberals maintain that the rosy Reagan legacy is based largely on myth, and...

Researched by a veteran travel writer who lives in Latin America, Frommer's Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands takes you through this fast-changing country, to visit rugged wilderness preserves, sleepy beach towns, the bustling, colonial captital, and, of course, the spectacular Galapagos Islands. Ecuador offers an opportunity for...

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Prepared under the auspices of the Optical Society of America, the five carefully architected and cross-referenced volumes of the Handbook of Optics, Third Edition, contain everything a student, scientist, or engineer requires to actively work in the field. From the...

Prepared under the auspices of the Optical Society of America, the five carefully architected and cross-referenced volumes of the Handbook of Optics, Third Edition, contain everything a student, scientist, or engineer requires to actively work in the field. From the...

Prepared under the auspices of the Optical Society of America, the five carefully architected and cross-referenced volumes of the Handbook of Optics, Third Edition, contain everything a student, scientist, or engineer requires to actively work in...

John Cort explores the narratives by which the Jains have explained the presence of icons of Jinas (their enlightened and liberated teachers) that are worshiped and venerated in the hundreds of thousands of Jain temples throughout India. Most of these narratives portray icons favorably, and so justify their existence; but there are also...

Every mathematician (beginner, amateur, and professional alike) thrills to find simple, elegant solutions to seemingly difficult problems. Such happy resolutions are called ``aha! solutions,'' a phrase popularized by mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner. Aha! solutions are surprising, stunning, and scintillating: they reveal the beauty...

Considering its importance, the history of fetal health and mortality remains a neglected area. Medical historians have tended to focus on maternal mortality and professional conflicts between midwives rather than on the unborn, while among the social scientists demographers and epidemiologists have until recently devoted most of their...

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