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By Ruth Harris

FROM THE INTRODUCTION : “In 1902, a hairdresser's assistant, Adrien Virgile Legrand, was sentenced in the Parisian Cour d'assises to hard labour for life for slitting his six-year-old son's throat. On the surface the case appeared simple enough, as Legrand freely admitted the deed and received the harsh punishment prescribed. However, during the trial, he asserted that he had acted under the influence of a 'delirious crisis', a defence which seriously complicated the proceedings. As in many other murder trials in this period, the issue became not whether he was the author of the crime but rather if he could be punished for it. To determine his responsibility, the court sought to evaluate Legrand's defence by probing into his motivations, character, and past history…”

Oxford. Clarendon. 1989. 385p.

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By Robert Fisk

FROM THE JACKET: “During the thirty years that award-winning journalist Robert Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East, he has covered every major event in the region, from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution. from the American hostage crisis in Beirut (as one of only two Western journalists in the city at the time) to the Iran-Iraq War. from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to Israel's invasions of Lebanon, from the Gulf War to the invasion and ongoing war in Iraq. Now he brings his knowledge. his firsthand experience and his intimate understanding of the Middle East to a book that addresses the full complexity of its political history and its current state of affairs.

Passionate in his concerns about the region and relentless in his pursuit of the truth, Fisk has been able to enter the world of the Middle East and the lives of its people as few other journalists have. The result is a work of stunning reportage. His unblinking eyewitness testimony to the horrors of war places him squarely in the tradition of the great frontline reporters of the Second World War. His searing descriptions of lives mangled in the chaos of battle and of the battles themselves are at once dreadful and heartrending.

This is also a book of lucid, incisive analysis. Reaching back into the long history of invasion, occupation and colonization in the region, Fisk sets forth this information in a way that makes clear how a history of injustice "has condemned the Middle East to war." He lays open the role of the West in the seemingly endless strife and warfare in the region, traces the growth of the West's involvement and infiuence there over the past one hundred years….

NY. Alfred Knopf. 2006. 1150p.

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By David Taylor

FROM THE COVER: “Between 1750 and 1914 the English criminal justice system was transformed. George Ill's England was lightly policed, and order was maintained through a draconian system of punishment which prescribed the death penalty for over 200 offences. Trials, even for capital offences, were short. The gallows were the visible means of showing justice in action and were intended to create awe among the public witnessing the death throes of a felon. However, by the time of Queen Victoria's death, public executions had been abolished, and the death penalty was confined in practice to cases of murder. The prison, that most lasting legacy of Victorian England, was the dominant site of punishment, society was more heavily policed, and court procedures had become longer, more formal and more concerned with the rights of the defendant.

Drawing upon recent research in one of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas of social history, this book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of these important developments. As well as looking at the underlying causes of change in the criminal justice system, the book concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the evolution of modern society has been shaped by the developments in the criminal justice system.

NY. St. Martin's Press. 1998. 219p.

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By Caroline Alexander

"With all the drama and intrigue of a rollicking adventure novel, Alexander's beautifully written and painstakingly researched book goes a long way to rehabilitate one of history's most notorious villains: Bounty commander Lt. William Bligh. Through letters, court testimony, and personal diaries, Alexander vividly re-creates the mutiny, the details of which changed, Rashomon-like, depending on the crew member telling the story." -Entertainment Weekly

"A captivating and properly salty account. The Bounty is a retelling of a remembered story in the grand manner. Alexander is particularly good at bringing to the fore lesser-known parts of the Bounty's story." -The Boston Globe

NY. Penguin. 2003. 542p.

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By Alan Palmer

FROM THE JACKET: “…the Ottoman Empire took “an unconscionable time dying.” Since the seventeenth century observers had been predicting the collapse of this so-called Sick Man of Europe. Yet it survived all its rivals. As late as 1910. the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents. Unlike the Romanovs. Habsburgs, or Hohenzollerns, the House of Osman. which had allied itself with the Kaiser, was still recognized as an imperial dynasty during the peace conference following World War I.

The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire offers a provocative view of the empire's decline, from the failure to take Vienna in 1683 to the abolition of the Sultanate by Alustafa Kemal Attaturk) in 1922 during a revolutionary upsurge in Turkish national pride. The narrative contains instances of violent evolt and bloody reprisals. such as the massacres of Armenians in 1806. and other "ethnic episodes" in Crete and Macedonia. More generally, it emphasizes recurring probleins: competition between religious arid secular authority; the acceptance or rejection of' lestern ideas: and the strength or weakness of succossive Sultans. The book also highlights the special chalienges of the early twentieth century, when railways and oilfields gave new importance to Ottoman lands in the Middle Eas!….”

NY. Barnes and Noble. 1992. 366p.

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By Niccolò Machiavelli. Introduction By Max Lerner

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “WE LIvE today in the shadow of a Florentine, the man who above all others taught the world to think in terms of cold political power. His name was Niccold Machiavelli, and he was one of those rare intellectuals who write about politics because they have had a hand in politics and learned what it is about. His portraits show a thin-faced, pale little man, with a sharp nose, sunken cheeks, subtle lips, a discreet and enigmatic smile, and piercing black eyes that look as if they knew much more than they were willing to tell…”

NY. Random House. 1950. 587p.

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By A. Petrie

FROM THE PREFACCE: “The following sketch of Roman (mainly Republican) History, Literature, and Antiquities is intended primarily for use alongside the Latin Reader by the same author; but it is hoped that it will also serve as a companion to Latin reading generally.”

G.B. A. Petrie. 1918. 149p.

By J. H. Plumb

FROM CHAPTER 1: “I he face of medieval Europe was scarred with the ruins barbarous Frangipani and their armed retainers, greedy, lawless, destructive; the Forum provided a quarry for churches and rough pasture for the cattle market, and beneath the broken columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux the bullocks awaited their slaughter. The Campagna was littered with the crumbling ruins of its aqueducts; the pavements of those splendid Roman roads were narrowed by the returning wilderness. Elsewhere scraps of walls, the ruins of arena, temple, and triumphal arch, sometimes embedded in the hovels and houses of a town struggling to regain its life or lost forever in the countryside, constantly reminded the man of the Middle Ages of the fleeting life of man, of the unknowable nature of Providence. For him the past was dead, and its relics but morals in stone, a terrible warning of the wickedness that God had punished…”

Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1961. 319p.

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By Jérôme Carcopino. Edited With Bibliography And Notes By Henry T. Rowell . Translated From The French By B. O. Lorimer

FROM THE PREFACE: “If 'Roman life' is not to become lost in anachronisms or petrified in abstraction, we must study it within a strictly defined period. Nothing changes more rapidly than human customs. Apart from the recent scientific discoverics which have turned the world of today upside down - steam, electricity, railways, motor-cars, and acroplanes - it is clear that even in times of greater stability and less highly developed technique the elementary forms of everyday life were subject to unceasing change. Coftee, tobacco, and champagne were not introduced into Europe until the seventeenth century; potatoes were first eaten toward the end of the eighteenth; the banana became a feature of our dessert at the beginning of the twentieth. The law of change was not less operative in antiquity. It was a commonplace of Roman rhetoric to contrast the rude simplicity of the republic with the lwxury and refinement of imperial times and to recall that Curius Dentatus 'gathered his scanty vegetables and himself cooked them on his little stove'!

London Penguin. 1967 (1941). 360p.

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By Dennis Sullivan

FROM THE COVER: “Based in a highly profitable fur trade, the seventeenth century Dutch criminal justice system of the upper Hudson River Valley regulated the community with an eye toward not only maintaining peaceful social relations, but also preserving the economic system that allowed the community to survive. This work examines the punishment practices of the Beverwijck/Albany court during the seventeenth century, delineating changes that occurred in those practices amid fluctuations in the fur trade and after the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664. This study shows that punishment practices were integrally linked to the economic status of the community and, after English conquest, to the introduction ofEnglish law.

"Dennis Sullivan's study of the punishment of crime in the upper Hudson Valley will be a major contribution to the growing bibliography of works relating to New Netherland. Researchers who work with primary source material will appreciate his rigorous use of the Dutch records at the New York State Archives. Sullivan has added another piece to the mosaic which will one day reveal New York's unique and rich colonial beginnings." — Charles Gehring, Director of the New Netherland Project

NY. Peter Lang, 1997. 367p.

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By Ann Cornelisen

FROM THE COVER: “This is the painful, heroic story of five contemporary peasant women in souther Italy- Peppina, Ninetta, Teresa, Pinuccia, Cettina. For these women and others like them, marriage is a practical and religious necessity although men and women spend very little time together once married. Many men leave their families to seek sporadic work in the cities or in other countries, and those who remain spend all of their free time with other men. Their wives are left to their own devices, and it is their earnings and their efforts that largely support the family….”

NY. Vintage. 1997. 247p.

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By Mary Renault

FROM THE COVER: “In the fifth century B.C., Alexias, a young Athenian of good family, reaches manhood during the last phases of the Peloponnesian War. The adult world he enters is one in which the power and influence of his class have been undermined by the forces of war. Alexias finds himself drawn to the controversial teachings of Sokrates, following him even though it at times endangers both his own life and his family's place in society. Among the great teacher's followers Alexias meets Lysis, and the two youths become inseparable- -together they wrestle in the palaestra, journey to the Olympic Games, and fight in the wars against Sparta. As their relationship develops against the background of famine, siege, and civil conflict, Mary Renault expertly conveys the intricacies of classical Greek culture.”

Vintage Books. A Division Of Random House, Inc.. 2001. 400p.

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By Christopher Hibbert

FROM THE AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Although there are very many books on the lives and times of the Medici, not since the appearance of Colonel G. F. Young's two-volume work in 1909 has there been a full-length study in English devoted to the history of the whole family from the rise of the Medic bank in the late fourteenth century under the guidance of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici to the death of the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Gian Gastone, in 1737. This book is an attempt to supply such a study and to offer a reliable alterative, based on the fruits of modern research, to Colonel Young's work, which Ferdinand Schevill has described as 'the subjective divagations of a sentimentalist with a mind above history'…..”

New York Morrow Quill Paperbacks. 1980.

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By Janine Assa, translated by Anne Hollander

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Half the human race - and even a little more - is made up of women. This mathematical truth, which history occasionally overlooks, tends too often to take on the glamor of a modern discovery, of an achievement of contemporary scientific progress. Must we suppose that the creature born of Adam's rib has required so many centuries to reach 'perfection"? It can indeed be asserted that ever since antiquity - and even before the birth of the Roman Empire - our masculine forbears have had to deal with woman already in possession of all the qualities recognized in the sex, of which either amiability or weakness is generally emphasized, according to the desire to win women over or to rule them….”

London. . Grove Press. Evergreen Profile Book 13. 1960. 196p.

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Edited By David Womersley

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Edward Gibbon (1737-94) published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in three instalments between 1776 and 1788. It was an immediate popular success, selling (as the delighted author put it) 'like a sixpenny pamphlet on the news of the day'. The book was immediately involved in controversy for its supposed hostility to established religion. But Gibbon's attitudes were much more nuanced, his intentions much more complicated, and his historical interests vastly more profound, than were those of any deist….”

London. Penguin Books. 1995. 97p.

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By Gordon Kavanagh

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Traditionally the effects of the Irish Famine have been interpreted as a watershed in Irish history, creating new conditions of demographic decline, altered farming structures and new economic policies, not to mention an institutionalised Anglophobia among the Irish at home and abroad. The Famine devastated the country and brought Ireland to its knees. The Famine was primarily the result of a crop disease, which destroyed the potato crop in 1845. The disease would return again in the ensuing years. It was not until the early 1850's that the country finally began to recover. In the meantime its people had experienced such horror and heartbreak that is difficult to comprehend today, where Ireland is a relatively affluent country, with much wealth and comfort….”

Ireland. Gordon Kavanagh and Gabriel Kavanag. 2003. 155p.

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By Michael Grant

FROM THE JACKET: “….Michael Grant dives into the reasons why the reign of this Roman emperor, which lasted from 306 to 337 A.D.. marked a watershed in the history of civilization, albeit one charged with irony. Founding his capital at Constantinople, Constantine revitalized the Enstern half of the empire, enabling it to survive and flourish (as the Byzantine Empire) for another thousand years. Yet, as Grant shows, this shift of power to the east would prove fatal to the Western empire and have profound consequences for Europe as a whole. Constantine’s most far-reaching decision, however. was the legalization of Christianity and his conversion to the faith. Without this dramatic change Christianity might have remained a suppressed. minority religion---or worse. Grant points out the irony behind this watershed, too: For Constantine, the Christian God represented not peace but power, not humanity but success in warfare. Whatever the emperor's motives, Christian writers of that period--and after--greatly admired Constantine. Grant draws on their writings judiciously, while noting, for example, that Eusebius fails to mention Constantine's murder of his own son and his empress. Grant deftly explores the many questions surrounding these killings--Had the son plotted revolution? Had his stepmother, the empress, fallen in love with him? Had the emperor allowed a charge of rape (possibly false) brought by the empress against the stepson to stand?…

NY. Barnes & Noble. 1993. 282p.

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By L. Mara Dodge

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “This study explores the treatment of women in Illinois prisons from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Although it fouses on a small minority of women-convicted felons--it asks far broader questions: Who were these women? What were their crimes? How and why did patterns of criminality, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing shift over the decades? How did factors such as race, class, ethnicity, age, marital status, reputation, and social standing influence the chain of official decisions that led from arrest to prosecution to conviction and, finally, to sentencing? Once women were sentenced, what was the character of their prison experience, and how did that experience evolve over time? How were women affected by shifting philosophies of punishment and rehabilitation; by changing ideologies of prison superintendents, psychiatrists, sociologists, and parole board members? What was the nature of discipline, surveillance, and social control within women's prisons? And finally, how did women resist, subvert, or accommodate prison regimes?

DeKalb, Illinois. Northern Illinois University Press. 2002. 347p.

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By Robert B. Asprey

FROM THE COVER: Napoleon Bonaparte has been too often remembered as either demi-god or devil incarnate. In The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first volume of a two-volume cradle-to-grave biography, Robert Asprey instead treats him as a human being Asprey tells this fascinating, tragic tale in lush narrative detail, charting the exciting, reckless thrill ride of Napoleon's vertiginous ascent to fame and the height of power. Here is Napoleon as he was--not saint, nor sinner, but a man devoured by his vision of himself, his empire and his world. "This work's great service is showing by a clear presentation of the facts just why Napolcon Bonaparte has been such an enduring figure of fascination for most of two centuries. When complete, Asprey's biography bids fair to become the standard work in English on the most prominent avatar of the great man' theory of history. -Boston Globe

NY. Basic Books. 2000. 604p.

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By Robert B. Asprey

FROM THE COVER: “This second volume of Robert Asprey's biography of Napoleon completes his monumental study of one of history's most enigmatic, complex and fascinating figures. The Reign of Napoleon Bonaparte chronicles Napoleon's chilling, reckless reign and fall from power. This swift-moving, dramatic volume opens where The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte left off, at Napoleon's astounding victory at Austerlitz in 1805, charting his life from the zenith of his power to his lonely, exile's deach sixteen years later on the island of Saint Helena. "Accessible, fast-moving narrative."-Publishers Weekly

NY. Basic Books. 2001. 509p.