Oxford University Press

The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in FranceA history of public executions in France from the medieval spectacle of suffering to the invention of the Revolutionary guillotine, up to the last public execution in 1939. Paul Friedland explores why spectacles of public execution were staged, as well as why thousands of spectators came to watch...

Lucan, grandson of Seneca the Rhetorician, and nephew of Seneca the Philosopher, was a remarkable and precocious product of the stimulating literary climate promoted by Nero.   His epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, unfinished at the time of his death, stands beside the poems of Virgil and Ovid in the first rank of Latin epic....

Autism Spectrum Disorder of the Pittsburgh Pocket Psychiatry Series highlights current key topics for this developmental neurobiological disorder: early identification and diagnosis; medical, psychiatric, behavioral, social, educational and language evaluations and treatment approaches; genetics and neurobiology; and transition-age and adult...

How People Cope with UncertaintyWhat is the nature of human wisdom? For many, the ideal image of sapiens is a        heavenly one: an omniscient God, a Laplacean demon, a supercomputer, or a fully        consistent logical system. Gerd Gigerenzer argues, in contrast, that there are more        efficient tools than logic in our minds, which he calls...

Why are some people worriers and others wanderers? Why do some seem good at empathizing and others at controlling? Daniel Nettle takes us on a tour through the science of human personality, looking at the latest findings from psychology, brain science, and evolution to explore the mystery of what makes us the way we are....

The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum NorthWhen four young men, slaves on Edward Gorsuch&'s Maryland farm, escaped to rural Pennsylvania in 1849, the owner swore he&'d bring them back. Two years later, Gorsuch lay dead outside the farmhouse in Christiana where he&'d tracked them down, as his federal posse retreated pell-mell...