What constitutes a need? Who gets to decide what people do or do not need? In modern France, scientists, both amateur and professional, were engaged in defining and measuring human needs. These scientists did not trust in a providential economy to di...

Renowned Eastern European author Adam Michnik was jailed for more than six years by the communist regime in Poland for his dissident activities. He was an outspoken voice for democracy in the world divided by the Iron Curtain and has remained so to t...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I forced the Irish Franciscans into exile. Of the four continental provinces to which the Irish Franciscans fled, the Prague Franciscan...

Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceas...

For sale in CIS only! Genoa has an incredible story to tell. It rose from an obscurity imposed by its harsh geography to become a merchant-pirate superpower that helped create the medieval world. It fought bitter battles with its great rival Venice...

Abigail L. Swingen's insightful study provides a new framework for understanding the origins of the British Empire while exploring how England's original imperial designs influenced contemporary English politics and debates about labor, economy, and...

Cathedrals and civic palaces stand to this day as symbols of the dynamism and creativity of the city-states that flourished in Italy during the Middle Ages. "Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy" argues that the bustling yet impermanent sites o...

Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet...

For sale in CIS only! The history of the Latvian people begins some four and a half millennia ago with the arrival of the proto-Baltic Indo-Europeans to northern Europe. One branch of these migrants coalesced into a community which evolved a distinc...

For sale in CIS only! Today Portuguese is the seventh most widely spoken language in the world and Brazil is a new economic powerhouse. Both phenomena result from the Portuguese 'Discoveries' of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Catholic missions...