The U.S. city is undergoing constant change. In the East and Midwest, most cities were founded as trading posts on waterways. They boomed during the industrial era and reached their population peak in the mid-20th century, before suburbanization and deindustrialization caused them to decline in importance. Traces of decay were everywhere, and the prognosis for the future was conceivably poor.As Barbara Hahn shows in her book, this trend now seems to have been broken: Things are loo...

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a cropHuman efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “crops...

Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its causes in government protection, global competition, and colonialism. Inventions from spinning jennies to steam engines came to define an age that culminated in the acceleration of the fashion cycle, the intensification in demand and supply of raw materials and the rise of a plantation system that w...

"The Jewess Pallas Athena"--a line from a poem by Paul Celan. It is a provocative phrase, cutting across cultures and traditions. But it poses questions: How to reconstruct a culture that has been destroyed? How to conceive of history after the catastrophes of the twentieth century?This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a country f...

The Cotton Kings relates a colorful economic drama with striking parallels to contemporary American economic debates. At the turn of the twentieth century, dishonest cotton brokers used bad information to lower prices on the futures market, impoverishing millions of farmers. To fight this corruption, a small group of brokers sought to control the price of cotton on unregulated exchanges in New York and New Orleans. They triumphed, cornering the world market in cotton and raising i...

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a cropHuman efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “crops...

A biography of a Jewish woman, a writer who hosted a literary and political salon in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, written by one of the twentieth century's most prominent intellectuals, Hannah Arendt.Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though not published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, passi...

THE LAND OF THE WHITE BIRDS presents a chance for children aged 6-12 and their parents to increase their environmental awareness together. It is a book for reading on your own as well as for reading aloud. The book contains a section with a varied range of activities, based on the super learning system, that help to deepen the children's knowledge about processes of cause and effect in our natural environment. Young readers are captivated following the adventures of Nick, a young hare who ...

Leverage Your Security Expertise in IBM® System z™ Mainframe EnvironmentsFor over 40 years, the IBM mainframe has been the backbone of the world’s largest enterprises. If you’re coming to the IBM System z mainframe platform from UNIX®, Linux®, or Windows®, you need practical guidance on leveraging its unique security capabilities. Now, IBM experts have written the first authoritative book on mainframe security spec...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism.In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other in...

"Makes a reader feel like a time traveler plopped down among men who were by turns vicious and visionary."—The Christian Science MonitorThe modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.A...

The need to handle increasingly larger data volumes is one factor driving the adoption of a new class of nonrelational “NoSQL” databases. Advocates of NoSQL databases claim they can be used to build systems that are more performant, scale better, and are easier to program.NoSQL Distilled is a concise but thorough introduction to this rapidly emerging technology. Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler explain how NoSQL databases work and the ways that they ma...