First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world.

Giuliana Chamedes offers the first comprehensive history of the Vatican's efforts to defeat the forces of secular liberalism and communism through international law, cultural diplomacy, and a marriage of convenience with authoritarian and right-wing rulers.

John Christopoulos provides a comprehensive account of abortion in early modern Italy. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives, he explores the meanings of a practice that was officially banned yet widely practiced and generally tolerated, demonstrating that Italy was hardly a haven for Catholic anti-abortion absolutism.

The Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and creation of market societies. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover early socialists' preoccupations with the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare, and the policies these ideas informed.

The Patria is a fascinating four-book collection of short historical notes, stories, and legends about the buildings and monuments of Constantinople, compiled in the late tenth century by an anonymous author. It is the only Medieval Greek text to present a panorama of the city as it existed in the middle Byzantine period.

Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in word and deed. Rorty challenges this lost generation to understand its potential role in the tradition of democratic intellectual labor that began with Whitman and Dewey.

Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its fixation on a computational model of mind, has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations of this model can we grasp the interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.

John and Abigail Adams remained engaged in political life after they left Washington for retirement in Quincy, Mass. A highlight of Volume 15 is a series of letters between Abigail and Thomas Jefferson that debated fundamental questions of the nation's tumultuous early years. Equally compelling family stories emerge in the volume's 251 letters.

American dispute resolution is more adversarial, compared with systems of other economically advanced countries. Americans more often rely on legal threats and lawsuits. American laws are generally more complicated and prescriptive, adjudication more costly, penalties more severe. Here, Kagan examines the origins and consequences of this system.

The world's most renowned critical theorist-who defined the field of postcolonial studies-has radically reoriented her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient, she argues that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy.

The prolific scholar-poet Callimachus of Cyrene spent his career at the royal court and great Library at Alexandria. Creatively reworking the language and generic properties of his predecessors, Callimachus developed a distinctive style, learned and elegant, that became an important model for subsequent poets both Greek and Roman.