Born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat, Tesmula Ao lost both her parents in quick succession when she was young. Left to fend for themselves, she and her five siblings ran wild, skipping school and wandering the streets. But when the authorities...

In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape".One Hour in Paris" takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspi...

In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution".The Only Woman in the Room" chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitu...

As an African American woman born in 1943, Maxine Childress Brown possessed a unique vantage point to witness the transformative events in her parents' lives. Both came from the South – her father, Herbert Childress, from Nashville, TN, and her mothe...

Galileo's telescopic discoveries, and especially his observation of sunspots, caused great debate in an age when the heavens were thought to be perfect and unchanging. Christoph Scheiner, a Jesuit mathematician, argued that sunspots were planets or m...

"Mama knew I was 'not right'" Kitty Fischer says of her early childhood in Louisiana. Even though her mother never said it, Kitty knew she meant "deaf and dumb". Her communication difficulties were compounded by the bias her family endured for being...