Since ours is the only guidebook that's official, this book includes the most accurate information on prices, changes, and new attractions for 2013: --The Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland is undergoing a massive expansion. We offer expert coverage of all the new attractions and eateries in this evolving wonderland, including The Seven Dwarfs Mine Train coaster (an E-ticket addition to the park's attraction lineup), and the boisterous Be Our Guest dinner experience in the brand-new Beast's Castle.--Disney villains are causing trouble and only YOU can stop them! Birnbaum delivers the details of a new, interactive role-playing game known as Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom. In this high-tech adventure, Merlin the Magician recruits park guests to help defeat an army of Disney villains.--There is a new resort in town: The colorful, "value" property dubbed Art of Animation. Birnbaum's description will help you decide if this family-friendly resort is for you--and show how to book a room or suite that suits your budget.--The Disney Dining Plan is ever-changing. Trust Birnbaum to deliver the latest on this popular program.--Downtown Disney is in the midst of a metamorphosis. Birnbaum describes the latest changes and additions to this shopping, dining, and entertainment district. Among the newest draws is Splitsville, WDW's go-to destination for bowling, billiards, and more. We will give you the skinny on this new play zone, plus many other additions to the Downtown Disney landscape.--Many classic Disney resorts are offering new layers of luxury--from princess or pirate rooms to wellness suites--and we have the scoop on getting the royal treatment at Walt Disney World.

    The place: Europe. The time: 25,000 years ago, the last Ice Age. In reality, you live in an open-air tent or a bone hut. But you also belong to a rich culture that creates art. In and around your cave paintings are handprints and dots, x’s and triangles, parallel lines and spirals. Your people know what they mean. You also use them on tools and jewelry. And then you vanish—and with you, their meanings.Join renowned archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger on an Indiana Jones-worthy adventure from the open-air rock art sites of northern Portugal to the dark depths of a remote cave in Spain that can only be reached by sliding face-first through the mud. Von Petzinger looks past the beautiful horses, powerful bison, graceful ibex, and faceless humans in the ancient paintings. Instead, she’s obsessed with the abstract geometric images that accompany them, the terse symbols that appear more often than any other kinds of figures—signs that have never really been studied or explained until now.Part travel journal, part popular science, part personal narrative, von Petzinger’s groundbreaking book starts to crack the code on the first form of graphic communication. It’s in her blood, as this talented scientist’s grandmother served as a code-breaker at Bletchley. Discernible patterns emerge that point to abstract thought and expression, and for the first time, we can begin to understand the changes that might have been happening inside the minds of our Ice Age ancestors—offering a glimpse of when they became us.

    Bidwell offers her firsthand experience and advice on Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills — including the Southern Hills, the Badlands, and Keystone. Bidwell provides unique travel strategies such as Best Hiking Trails, Viewing Wildlife, and Fossil Collecting in the Parks, Grasslands, and National Forest. Expert tips include the best sights for dining, shopping, accommodations, and camping, providing travelers with the tools they need for a more personal and memorable visit to Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills.

    It was a period marked by lavish displays of wealth, a dazzling cultural mix, and the advent of Christianity. The splendor and squalor of the city, the spectacles, and the day’s routines are reconstructed from an immense fund of archaeological evidence and from vivid descriptions by ancient poets, satirists, letter-writers, and novelists—from Petronius to Pliny the Younger. In a new Introduction, the eminent classicist Mary Beard appraises the book’s enduring—and sometimes surprising—influence and its value for general readers and students. She also provides an up-to-date bibliographic essay. “Carcopino’s pledge to his readers was to open up to them some traces of the world that lay underneath the grandeur that remains the public face of ancient Rome. . . . No one has ever done it better.”—Mary Beard, from the Introduction

    Written by two of the foremost experts on Mayan hieroglyphic decipherment, this book includes a concise text accompanied by a timeline, illustrations, maps, photographs, useful summaries and guides to decipherment and spellings. It outlines the major periods of history and aspects of Mayan culture before focusing on issues of divinity, power and authority, the royal court, war, death and burial and politics for each of the kingdoms studied: Tikal, Dos Pilas, Naranjo, Caracol, Calakmul, Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, Palenque, Tonina, Copan and Quirigua.

    75 full-color and 140 black-and-white photographs.

    Virtually unknown to archaeologists until the early twentieth century, their true importance is only now being realized and shedding new light on how the Indian peoples of the Americas came to be here.

    As much as 7,000 years older than the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge, its strange buildings and rings of T-shaped monoliths--built with stones weighing from 10 to 15 tons--show a level of sophistication and artistic achievement unmatched until the rise of the great civilizations of the ancient world, Sumer, Egypt, and Babylon. Chronicling his travels to Göbekli Tepe and surrounding sites, Andrew Collins details the layout, architecture, and exquisite relief carvings of ice age animals and human forms found at this 12,000-year-old megalithic complex, now recognized as the oldest stone architecture in the world. He explores how it was built as a reaction to a global cataclysm--the Great Flood in the Bible--and explains how it served as a gateway and map to the sky-world, the place of first creation, reached via a bright star in the constellation of Cygnus. He reveals those behind its construction as the Watchers of the Book of Enoch and the Anunnaki gods of Sumerian tradition. Unveiling Göbekli Tepe’s foundational role in the rise of civilization, Collins shows how it is connected to humanity’s creation in the Garden of Eden and the secrets Adam passed to his son Seth, the founder of an angelic race called the Sethites. In his search for Adam’s legendary Cave of Treasures, the author discovers the Garden of Eden and the remains of the Tree of Life--in the same sacred region where Göbekli Tepe is being uncovered today.

    On the other hand, post-Apartheid dreams of progress and reform have, in part, collapsed into a morass of corruption, unemployment and criminal violence.A Short History of South Africa is a brief, general account of the history of this most complicated and fascinating country – from the first evidence of hominid existence to the wars of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries that led to the establishment of modern South Africa, the horrors of Apartheid and the optimism following its collapse, as well as the prospects and challenges for the future.This readable and thorough account, illustrated with maps and photographs, is the culmination of a lifetime of researching and teaching the broad spectrum of South African history.Nattrass’s passion for her subject shines through, whether she is elucidating the reader on early humans in the cradle of humankind, or describing the tumultuous twentieth-century processes that shaped the democracy that is South Africa today.

    Author and burger expert George Motz covers traditional grilling techniques as well as how to smoke, steam, poach, and deep-fry burgers based on signature recipes from around the country. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific regional burger, from the tortilla burger of New Mexico to the classic New York–style pub burger, and from the fried onion burger of Oklahoma to Hawaii’s Loco Moco. Motz provides expert instruction, tantalizing recipes, and vibrant color photography to help you create unique variations on America’s favorite dish in your own home. Recipes feature regional burgers from: California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

    With economy and style, Dr. Robert Allison brings Boston history alive, from the Puritan theocracy of the seventeenth century to the Big Dig of the twenty-first. His book includes a wealth of illustrations, a lengthy chronology of the key events in four centuries of Boston history, and twenty short profiles of exceptional Bostonians, from founder John Winthrop to heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, from heretic Anne Hutchinson to Russian-American author Mary Antin. Says the Provincetown Arts, A first-rate short history of the city, lavishly illustrated, lovingly written, and instantly the best book of its kind.

    Focusing on art before 1520, this edition organizes the material chronologically. It now incorporates considerable new material on the history of music and theatre, and updates scholarship on ancient art.

    Read a concise history of South Africa in just one hour.South Africa is a nation that has been ravaged by oppression and racial inequality. After years of concentrated violence and apartheid, Nelson Mandela led the country to unite ‘for the freedom of us all’ as the country’s first black President.SOUTH AFRICA: HISTORY IN AN HOUR gives a lively account of the formation of modern South Africa, from the first contact with seventeenth-century European sailors, through the colonial era, the Boer Wars, apartheid and the establishment of a tolerant democracy in the late twentieth century. Here is a clear and fascinating overview of the emergence of the ‘Rainbow Nation’.Love your history? Find out about the world with History in an Hour…

    A quick read packed with information from cover to cover. Here you will find out: Which US president survived an assassination attempt - and didn’t even pause his speech? What holiday’s origin story was actually just a tall tale to unite a country at war? Where in the world can you find an American mountain range - that isn’t in America? How did an earthquake lead to the Trail of Tears? What First Lady gossip shook up an entire presidential cabinet? Overstuffed like the Thanksgiving turkey with answers to these questions and more facts - sometimes fun, sometimes serious, but always as true as we can confirm amongst America’s fables - The Great Book of American Trivia takes on the real drama behind the quaint stories we found as students in US history books. A novelty amongst trivia books, here you’ll learn the real stories, the mysteries, and the fascinating tidbits about American history from its first inhabitants to present day.Whether you know nothing about America’s past or you consider yourself an expert, you’ll learn something new and find yourself entertained as you discover or relive the nation’s troubles, mistakes, triumphs, and challenges. Dig in now and start learning the interesting stories that shaped America into what it is today.

    Ranging from 700,000 BC to 311 AD, this volume portrays the emergence and development of Egypt from its prehistoric roots to its conquest by the Roman Empire. The contributors--all leading scholars working at the cutting edge of Egyptology--incorporate the latest findings in archaeological research as they chart the principal political events of Egyptian history, from the rise of the Pharaohs and the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, to the ascension of the Ptolemies and the coming of Roman legions. The book also includes the first detailed examinations of three periods which were previously regarded as dark ages. Against the backdrop of the birth and death of ruling dynasties, the writers also examine cultural and social patterns, including stylistic developments in art and literature, monumental architecture, funerary beliefs, and much more. The contributors illuminate the underlying patterns of social and political change and describe the changing face of ancient Egypt, from the biographical details of individuals to the social and economic factors that shaped the lives of the people as a whole. The only up-to-date, single-volume history of ancient Egypt available in English, The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt is a must read for everyone interested in one of the great civilizations of antiquity.