Despite not having brains or central nervous systems, plants perceive their surroundings with an even greater sensitivity than animals. They efficiently explore and react promptly to potentially damaging external events thanks to their cooperative, shared systems; without any central command centers, they are able to remember prior catastrophic events and to actively adapt to new ones.Every page of Plant Revolution bubbles over with Stefano Mancuso’s infectious love for plants and for the eye-opening research that makes it more and more clear how remarkable our fellow inhabitants on this planet really are. In his hands, complicated science is wonderfully accessible, and he has loaded the book with gorgeous photographs that make for an unforgettable reading experience. Plant Revolution opens the doors to a new understanding of life on earth.

    Dr. Hoeller traces this fascinating story throughout time and shows how Gnosticism has inspired such great thinkers as Voltaire, Blake, Yeats, Hesse, Melville, and Jung.

    From this perspective, you'll study the complex but absorbing causes of the Crusades, which include the many political, cultural, and economic changes in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. You'll examine the Crusades in terms of the specific military campaigns-the eight "canonical" Crusades that took place from 1095-1291-proclaimed to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim hands and return them to Christendom. You'll consider the immediate circumstances-the leaders, purposes, key battles, and degrees of success or failure-surrounding these often-monumental expeditions.You'll also explore a wide variety of misperceptions and long-debated questions about the Crusades:Did the popes preach the Crusades as a way to increase their personal power and authority?Why did the members of the Fourth Crusade decide to sack Constantinople, turning the Crusades from Christian against "infidel" to Christian against Christian?Taken together, these historically rich lectures are an opportunity to appreciate fully how Western Civilization changed in many profound ways during the Crusading era.

    And like it or not, it’s one of the most important things you do on a daily basis. Successful conversationshelp you advance professionally and make, maintain, and deepen relationships. Moreover, research shows that talking, when done on a substantive level, is correlated with a feeling of happiness and general well-being.Being a great conversationalist requires practice and effort. The good news is it’s a skill set anyone can acquire and refine. In just six lectures, How Conversation Works: 6 Lessons for Better Communication will teach you key strategies that can dramatically improve your ability to converse with anyone, from strangers to supervisors. Delivered by award-winning English professor Anne Curzan of the University of Michigan, this highly practical course focuses on the fundamental principles you need to know to become more conversationally aware and savvy at home, in the workplace, and beyond.You’ll be amazed by how much you can learn by stepping back from conversations and examining how they operate. You’ll notice things you never picked up on before—like what kind of speaker you are, the strategies you typically rely on (often without realizing it), and the subtleties of the strategies others may use when speaking with you. You’ll find yourself putting these lessons into practice to create more effective dialogues from the very first lecture.Choose Your Words WiselyAn expression like “shooting the breeze” makes conversation sound easy and free-flowing, but even low-stakes conversations have an underlying systematic structure that propels them along. This course examines that framework while showing you how the effective selection of words can help you forge connections and accomplish your objectives.Professor Curzan walks you through techniques for negotiating a variety of difficult situations, from proffering successful apologies to engaging in “face-threatening acts”—those uncomfortable moments that have the potential to do damage if your words aren’t chosen carefully.You’ll learn graceful ways of pointing out a mistake; asking someone to do something he or she doesn’t want to do; preparing a person for “no”; asking for a big favor; and providing information the recipient doesn’t want to hear.Conversations can only deepen connections when you pull your weight. In How Conversation Works, you’ll learn this involves knowing how to skillfully open and close an exchange, take turns speaking or “negotiate the conversational floor,” and send people subtle signals.Perhaps most important is sharing the burden to make discussions feel more mutual and enjoyable. These lectures arm you with numerous conversation-facilitating devices such as asking your fair share of questions and follow-up questions, which requires active listening; providing informative (but not overly informative!) answers to other people’s questions; introducing new topics for discussion and picking up on the topics of others; and telling good stories and helping good stories along.Talk Your Way to SuccessWhether you want to build rapport with colleagues, promote your accomplishments in an interview, give a winning presentation, ingratiate yourself with your boss, or even create a connection on a first date, knowing what to say and how to say it allows for more productive, smoother interactions. How Conversation Works helps you get ahead by outlining simple techniques for accomplishing all of this and more.Short vignettes featuring professional actors demonstrate what to do—and what not to do—in a variety of everyday scenarios such as striking up a conversation at a party. In video formats, green-screen technology places the professor in a range of environments as she provides concrete advice for taking an uncomfortable conversation in a new direction, making polite requests, mastering the “humble brag,” limiting your “talk time,” and monitoring your use of distracting discourse markers such as “um” and “you know.”In addition to sharing these out-the-door tips and techniques, Professor Curzan dispels common myths about conversation and presents enlightening research on how the conversational styles of men and women share much in common, despite differences in socialization; how you may be perceived for using direct speech or sentence fillers; how language-style matching quickly creates a sense of compatibility; how parents serve as conversational role models; and how e-communication has surprisingly systematic conventions.A Guide for the Real WorldAs a professor of English and linguistics and member of the American Dialect Society, Professor Curzan offers a refreshing yet scholarly take on the subject of conversation. Using a developmental and skills-based approach that gets right to the heart of the matter, her course provides tangible, actionable methods that can be worked into your conversational repertoire immediately. At first, the newfound awareness you’ll acquire from How Conversation Works may cause you to become self-conscious when you speak, but the act of “conversational noticing” will soon become second nature. Before long, you’ll realize you have the tools to make yourself clearly understood, put others at ease, rescue a conversation that’s gone wrong—and keep conversations from going off course in the first place.

    The Great Ideas of Classical Physics 2. Describing MotionA Break from Aristotle 3. Describing Ever More Complex Motion 4. Astronomy as a Bridge to Modern Physics 5. Isaac NewtonThe Dawn of Classical Physics 6. Newton QuantifiedForce and Acceleration 7. Newton and the Connections to Astronomy 8. Universal Gravitation 9. Newton's Third Law 10. Conservation of Momentum 11. Beyond NewtonWork and Energy 12. Power and the Newtonian Synthesis 13. Further DevelopmentsStatic Electricity 14. Electricity, Magnetism, and Force Fields 15. Electrical Currents and Voltage 16. The Origin of Electric and Magnetic Fields 17. Unification IMaxwell's Equations 18. Unification IIElectromagnetism and Light 19. Vibrations and Waves 20. Sound Waves and Light Waves 21. The Atomic Hypothesis 22. Energy in SystemsHeat and Thermodynamics 23. Heat and the Second Law of Thermodynamics 24. The Grand Picture of Classical Physics

    And it has an undeniable power to move us in ways that enrich our lives - provided it is understood.If you have ever longed to appreciate great concert music, to learn its glorious language and share in its sublime pleasures, the way is now open to you, through this series of 48 wonderful lectures designed to make music accessible to everyone who yearns to know it, regardless of prior training or knowledge. It's a lecture series that will enable you to first grasp music's forms, techniques, and terms - the grammatical elements that make you fluent in its language - and then use that newfound fluency to finally hear and understand what the greatest composers in history are actually saying to us.And as you learn the gifts given us by nearly every major composer, you'll come to know there is one we share with each of them - a common humanity that lets us finally understand that these were simply people speaking to us, sharing their passion and wanting desperately to be heard. Using digitally recorded musical passages to illustrate his points, Professor Greenberg will take you inside magnificent compositions by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and more. Even if you have listened to many of these illustrative pieces throughout your life - as so many of us have - you will never hear them the same way again after experiencing these lectures.

    It’s difficult to imagine a nation whose history is more compelling for Americans than that of Russia.Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was the nation against which we measured our own nation’s values and power and with whom war, if it ever came, could spell unimaginable catastrophe for our planet.Yet many Americans have never had the opportunity to study Russia in any kind of depth and to see how the forces of history came together so ironically to shape a future so very different from the dreams of most ordinary Russian people, eager to see their nation embrace Western values of progress, human rights, and justice.

    Until April 19 2008, Josef Fritzl seemed like an upstanding member of the community in the Austrian town of Amstetten: an ideal father and successful businessman who had worked his way up from humble beginnings to become a role model of respectability.Yet for over two decades he had been living a double life of unimaginable and unparalleled horror. In 1984 he had drugged his 18-year-old daughter, Elisabeth, and dragged her into a purpose-made prison under the house that he had spent five years preparing. He held her captive there for 24 years and raped her frequently. Fritzl initially kept his daughter chained to a bed and forced her to re-enact scenes from pornographic films he projected in the cellar. Three months into her incarceration Elisabeth miscarried what would have been her first child. Over the next 18 years in the cellar she bore her father seven children - six of whom survived. Lisa, Monika and Alexander were taken 'upstairs' to live with their grandmother. Michael died after birth. Kerstin, Stefan and Felix were never to see daylight, trapped with their mother in the five-room cellar.This bold and forensically-researched study sheds new light on the mind and the psychological development of the man who became one of the most unique and frightening criminals in history. It includes new information on the bizarre formative experiences that shaped his pathology and argues that his crimes, though unthinkable, were in many ways inevitable.Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski were the first English-speaking reporters to break the case and were there as the police uncovered the dungeon. They draw on previously unreleased testimonies from the trial as well as exclusive interviews and documents including confidential official files on the case to give the only complete and authoritative account of the forces that drove Fritzl to create another world, far from the light, in which his fantasies of control could be played out.

    This era shook the foundations of the old world and marked a permanent shift for politics, religion, and society - not just for France, but for all of Europe. An account of the events alone reads like something out of a thrilling novel: France’s oppressed and hungry masses rise up against their government. In Paris, crowds storm the Bastille looking for bread and weaponry. Rumors, panic, and fear grip the nation as it faces an uncertain future. The National Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the first bold step toward the invention of democratic politics and a republican state. A young Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte stuns Europe with his military strategy and political boldness.Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon is your opportunity to learn the full story of this captivating period. Taught by Dr. Suzanne M. Desan, these 48 exciting lectures give you a broad and comprehensive survey of one of the most important eras in modern history.Disclaimer: Please note that this recording may include references to supplemental texts or print references that are not essential to the program and not supplied with your purchase.©2013 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2013 The Great Courses

    History at its most interesting is complex, a fascinating whirl of events, personalities, and forces, and few periods of history offer us such captivating complexity as Europe's 19th "century"—the often-broadly defined period from the French Revolution to World War I that formed the foundation of the modern world.How was that foundation built? And what did that transition to modernity mean for peasants, workers, the middle class, aristocrats, women, and minorities?Why did an era that began with the idealism of the French Revolution and the power of the Industrial Revolution culminate in the chaos of World War I, considered by most historians to be the greatest tragedy of modern European history? Did nationalism and imperialism inevitably lead in such a direction, or were there other factors involved?Even these questions, as important as they are, can only hint at the complexity of this period, just as this course can really only put us on a path toward the answers.

    He joins the healing of the land to the process of purifying the human spirit and proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which such healing can take place.

    As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man." In fact, civilization itself began in the quest for food. Humanity's transition to agriculture was not only the greatest social revolution in history, but it directly produced the structures and institutions we call "civilization." In 36 fascinating lectures, award-winning Professor Albala puts this extraordinary subject on the table, taking you on an enthralling journey into the human relationship to food. With this innovative course, you'll travel the world discovering fascinating food lore and culture of all regions and eras - as an eye-opening lesson in history as well as a unique window on what we eat today.

    They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms and supply psychological benefits to humans as well, improving our moods and beautifying the landscape around us. But plants don't just passively provide. They also take action.Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They "know" what and who they are, and they use this knowledge to make a way in the world. Plants experience a kind of sensation that does not require eyes or ears. They distinguish kin, friend, and foe, and they are able to respond to ecological competition despite lacking the capacity of fight-or-flight. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors that allow them to maximize their chances of survival in a dynamic and sometimes unfriendly environment.Lessons from Plants enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery's meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do?

    Introduction 2. The Sources 3. Pre-Roman Italy and the Etruscans 4. The Foundation of Rome 5. The Kings of Rome 6. Regal Society 7. The Beginnings of the Republic 8. The Struggle of the Orders 9. Roman Expansion in Italy 10. The Roman Confederation in Italy 11. The International Scene on the Eve of Roman Expansion 12. Carthage and the First Punic War 13. The Second Punic (or Hannibalic) War 14. Rome in the Eastern Mediterranean 15. Explaining the Rise of the Roman Empire 16. "The Captured Conqueror"-Rome and Hellenism 17. Governing the Roman Republic, Part I-Senate and Magistrates 18. Governing the Roman Republic, Part II-Popular Assemblies and Provincial Administration 19. The Pressures of Empire 20. The Gracchi Brothers 21. Marius and Sulla 22. "The Royal Rule of Sulla" 23. Sulla's Reforms Undone 24. Pompey and Crassus 25. The First Triumvirate 26. Pompey and Caesar 27. "The Domination of Caesar" 28. Social and Cultural Life in the Late Republic 29. Antony and Octavian 30. The Second Triumvirate 31. Octavian Emerges Supreme 32. The New Order of Augustus 33. The Imperial Succession 34. The Julio-Claudian Dynasty 35. The Emperor in the Roman World 36. The Third-Century Crisis 37. The Shape of Roman Society 38. Roman Slavery 39. The Family 40. Women in Roman Society 41. An Empire of Cities 42. Public Entertainment, Part I-The Roman Baths and Chariot Racing 43. Public Entertainment, Part II-Gladiatorial Games 44. Roman Paganism 45. The Rise of Christianity 46. The Restoration of Order 47. Constantine and the Late Empire 48. Thoughts on the "Fall" of the Roman Empire

    For example, the matter that comprises all stars, planets, and living things turns out to be just a fraction of what actually exists. Moreover, we think that we control our actions, but data analytics can predict, with astonishing accuracy, when we will wake up, what we will buy, and even whom we will marry.The quest to pin down what's real and what's illusory is both philosophical and scientific, a metaphysical search for ultimate reality that goes back to the ancient Greeks. For the last 400 years, this search has been increasingly guided by scientists, who create theories and test them in order to define and redefine reality. And we have developed the power to alter our own reality in major ways - to defeat diseases, compensate for disabilities, and augment our intellect with computers. Where is that trend going?Experience the thrill of this exciting quest in 36 wide-ranging lectures that touch on many aspects of the ceaseless search for reality. From the birth of the universe to brain science, discover that separating the real from the illusory is an exhilarating intellectual adventure.Scientists and philosophers are not alone in grappling, at an intellectual level, with reality. Some of the most accessible interpretations are by painters, novelists, filmmakers, and other artists whose works not only draw on the latest discoveries but also sometimes inspire them. Explore examples such as Alice in Wonderland, pointillism, cubism, surrealism, and reality TV.And since dealing with reality is an experience we all share, this course is designed for people of all backgrounds.