Some would argue that innovation is the exclusive province of creative geniuses people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson or Bill Gates. These are individuals for whom, it seems, innovation has always come naturally. Its as if these people are wired differently from the rest of us somehow they are able to intuitively spot opportunities that remain invisible to mere mortals or ordinary companies. But what if we could unpack the discovery process much more precisely by getting inside the mind ...

In The Baron in the Grand Canyon, Steven Rowan presents the first comprehensive look at the life of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein, mapmaker, artist, explorer, and inventor. Utilizing new German and American sources, Rowan clarifies many mysteries about the life of this major artist and cartographer of the American West.This revealing account concentrates on Egloffstein’s activity in the American mountain West from 1853 to 1858. The early chapters cover his roots ...

Medievalists, historians, and women's studies specialists will welcome this translation of Herbert Grundmann's classic study of religious movements in the Middle Ages because it provides a much-needed history of medieval religious life--one that lies between the extremes of doctrinal classification and materialistic analysis--and because it represents the first major effort to underline the importance of women in the development of the language and practice of religion in the Middle Ages.

One of the most scandalous books published in America at the time."Reizenstein's peculiar vision of New Orleans is worth resurrecting precisely because it crossed the boundaries of acceptable taste in nineteenth-century German America and squatted firmly on the other side . . . This work makes us realize how limited our notions were of what could be conceived by a fertile American imagination in the middle of the nineteenth century."—from the Introduction by Steven...

From Alexander von Humboldt to Charles and Anne Lindbergh, these are stories of people of great vision and daring whose achievements continue to inspire us today, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough.The bestselling author of Truman and John Adams, David McCullough has written profiles of exceptional men and women past and present who have not only shaped the course of history or changed how we see the world but whose stories expr...

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articul...

A Seattle Times selection for one of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010Winner of the New England Historial Association's 2010 James P. Hanlan AwardWinner of the Outdoor Writers Association of America 2011 Excellence in Craft Award, Book Division, First Place"A compelling and well-annotated tale of greed, slaughter and geopolitics." —Los Angeles TimesAs Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that...

To obtain sacred relics, medieval monks plundered tombs, avaricious merchants raided churches, and relic-mongers scoured the Roman catacombs. In a revised edition of Furta Sacra, Patrick Geary considers the social and cultural context for these acts, asking how the relics were perceived and why the thefts met with the approval of medieval Christians.

"Excitement abounds in Scott Weidensaul's detailed history of the first clashes between European settlers and Native Americans on the East Coast."—Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking WomanFrontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between complex Native cult...

Originally published in 1957, this classic work has guided generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. Throughout history, the notion of two bodies has permitted the postmortem continuity of monarch and monarchy, as epitomized by the statement, “The king is dead. Long live the king.” In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the historical dilemma posed by the “King’s two bodies”—the body natural and the body politic—back to the Mi...

The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry (ordo) in the community. By this definition, women were in fact ordained into several ministries. A radical change in the definitio...

The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birthA horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.By 1776, when military action and political ferment ...