This textbook offers undergraduates a self-contained introduction to advanced topics not covered in a standard calculus sequence. The author’s enthusiastic and engaging style makes this material, which typically requires a substantial amount of study, accessible to students with minimal prerequisites. Readers will gain a broad knowledge of the area, with approaches based on those found in recent literature, as well as historical remarks that deepen the exposition. Specific topics covered i...

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, most Americans probably encountered European classical music primarily through hymn tunes. Hymnody was the most popular and commercially successful genre of the antebellum period in the United States, and the unquenchable thirst for new tunes to sing led to a phenomenon largely forgotten today: in their search for fresh material, editors lifted hundreds of tunes from the works of major classical composers to use as settings of psalms and hymns. T...

The Companion to Mendelssohn, is written by leading scholars in the field. In fourteen chapters they explore the life, work, and reception of a composer-performer once thought uniquely untroubled in life and art alike, but who is now broadly understood as one of the nineteenth century's most deeply problematic musical figures. The first section of the volume considers issues of biography, with chapters dedicated to Mendelssohn's role in the emergence of Europe's modern musical institutions...

For a pinch of flavor, the world went to war.The salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sugar sitting in your kitchen cost a few dollars. For most of history, each was worth more than its weight in gold — and men killed, sailed, enslaved, and built empires to control them.Spice, Book Three of Materials That Changed the World, tells eight true stories of the flavors that seasoned empires. Follow a single craving — for something sweeter, saltier, hotter, richer — as it drags fleets across...

This morning, before you were fully awake, you held a conquest in your hand. It was just the cup.The white porcelain of your mug was a secret Europe couldn't crack for a thousand years. The shine on your spoon came out of a silver mountain fed with human lives. The red of your table was a felled rainforest, the shell of your buttons was hauled up by divers who never came up right. None of it announced itself. Every object in the room had a mouth, and kept it shut.The Empire...

For three hundred years, Europe could not stop consuming the Egyptian dead. They ate them, painted with them, and sold them by the ton.In a London lecture theatre in the 1830s, a fashionable crowd in evening dress pressed in to watch a surgeon unwrap a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian body in front of them. Tickets were hard to get. It was entertainment. And it was only the most respectable use Europe had found for the mummies it had already been grinding into medicine, crushing in...

Hitler had never lost. He had also never fought for a city that carried his greatest enemy's name.In the summer of 1942, the German army rolled east toward the Volga, unstoppable and certain of victory. What waited for them in Stalingrad was not a battle but a slaughter without end—two hundred days of fighting in cellars and stairwells, sewers and shattered factories, where the front line moved room by room and a soldier's life was measured in hours.The Battle of Stalingrad...

You got dressed this morning without knowing you were putting on an empire.The jeans gone soft at the knee. The watch on your wrist. The waterproof coat by the door, the ring on your finger, the heels at the back of the closet. Every one of them began as a weapon, a conquest, or a crime — and then quietly moved into your wardrobe.The Empire Is the Tailor tells the true story of ten everyday garments and the wars, empires, and fortunes that cut them. This is history you can ...

History is usually told as a story of kings and armies. Its real author was the land.Why did civilization rise on some rivers and never on others? Why did some peoples build empires while their neighbors—no less clever or brave—vanished from the record? For most of human history, the answer was not character or destiny. It was terrain: the mountains, coastlines, rivers, and soil that quietly decided who would rise and who would be forgotten.Terrain of Empire: How Geography ...

Two titans. One room. A duel history tried to erase.Florence, 1504. The city commissions the two greatest artists alive to paint the facing walls of its grandest hall — at the same time, in full view of each other. Leonardo da Vinci: fifty-two, famous, untouchable. Michelangelo Buonarroti: twenty-nine, and hungry to dethrone him. They already despise each other. Now the Republic has handed them the perfect weapon — a wall, a rival, and an audience.What followed was the most...

Around six thousand years ago, communities between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers began building some of the world’s earliest cities. In Mesopotamia, systems of writing, law, government, trade, religion, and warfare developed in forms that would influence later civilizations.This book traces the rise and decline of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. It explores the growth of cities such as Uruk and Babylon, the development of cuneiform writing, the laws associat...

Pearl Harbor was the safest anchorage in the United States Navy. On a quiet Sunday morning, it became the deadliest.December 7, 1941. Sailors slept, chaplains prepared for services, and the battleships of the Pacific Fleet sat in a neat row in the Hawaiian sun. Two hundred miles to the north, the first wave of Japanese aircraft was already climbing into the sky. What followed killed more than 2,400 people in under two hours—and dragged a reluctant America into the deadliest war in ...