Yale University Press

During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than...

In this completely updated edition of Henry Kamen's classic survey of the Spanish Inquisition, he incorporates the latest research in multiple languages to offer a new - and thought-provoking - view of this fascinating period. Kamen sets the notorious Christian tribunal into the broader context of Islamic and Jewish culture in the Mediterranean,...

In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time - climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns and people - the nations of the world seem paralyzed. The problems are too big, too interdependent, too divisive for the nation-state. Is the nation-state, once democracy's best hope, today democratically dysfunctional?...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and Enlightenment essays and philosophical texts, together with the inherent skepticism about life...

This insightful volume offers a radical reassessment of the infamous "Gulag Archipelago" by exploring the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost originally established in the 1930s as a prison camp complex. Author Alan Barenberg's eye-opening study reveals Vorkuta as an active urban center with a substantial nonprisoner population where...

In this lively and provocative book, Michael Coogan guides readers into the ancient past to examine the iconic status of the Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue. How, among all the laws reportedly given on Mount Sinai, did the Ten Commandments become the Ten Commandments? When did that happen? There are several versions of the Decalogue...