The second edition of the Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois offers up-to-date information on the state’s 102 species of frogs and toads, salamanders, turtles, lizards, and snakes. Detailed descriptions by the authors include habitats, distinguishing features, behaviors, and other facts, while revised range maps and full-color photographs help users recognize animals in the field. In addition, an identification key and easy-to-navigate page layouts guide readers th...

From Texas to Virginia, towns, regions, counties, regiments, prisons, and even refugee camps played a significant role in shaping the contours of the Civil War. According to historian Daniel E. Sutherland, whose many books and essays helped establish the field of community studies, these varied assemblages of individuals experienced and fought the real war. Following his lead, the contributors to Hundreds of Little Wars reveal how viewing the war from the vantage point of singular...

The Reverend Professor Dorothy A. Lee FAHA is well-known as a New Testament scholar not only in Australia but around the world. An Anglican priest, her ministry, particularly as a preacher and retreat director, is highly regarded and highly sought after, not only in her home city of Melbourne, but in many parts of the country. This Festschrift volume honors her contributions and ministry on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. An interdisciplinary collection of twenty-one essays, it of...

Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the flu...

"A bracing, rollicking read about the spark that ignites when people start asking meaningful questions." —O MagazineChristopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. "Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day-care centers, elem...

The border states during the Civil War have long been ignored or misunderstood in general histories. This book corrects that oversight, explaining how many border state residents used wartime realities to redefine their politics and culture as "Southern."By studying the characteristics of those positioned along this fault line during the Civil War, the centrality of the war issue of slavery, which border residents long eschewed as being divisive, became apparent. T...

In 1996, Phillips started on a journey across America introducing his love of questions, using the Socratic method, to anyone who was interested. In creating his first Socrates Café, he created an atmosphere of free exchange and energetic thinking, reviving the pleasures of examining one's most cherished beliefs.

How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates.What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Following in Socrates's footsteps, Christopher Phillips—"Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree" (Utne Reader)—investigates these same qu...

An unprecedented analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria's ongoing civil war"One of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published."—Patrick Cockburn, IndependentSyria's brutal, long-lasting civil war is widely viewed as a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the fray. But...

How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates.What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Following in Socrates's footsteps, Christopher Phillips—"Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree" (Utne Reader)—investigates these same qu...

Christopher Phillips has devoted his life to carrying the torch of Socrates and his quest to "Know Thyself." Yet upon the death of his beloved father and mentor, the originator of the burgeoning global Socrates Café movement had little choice but to confront the inescapable truth: that there are some things we cannot know for sure. This moving, insightful and ultimately hopeful and helpful blend of memoir and philosophical exploration begins in Phillips' native stomping grounds of the isla...

Christopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. “Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master’s degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day care centers, elementary and high schools, and churches, forming lasting communities of inquiry”—Utne Reader. Phillips not only presents the fundamentals of ph...