Book picks similar to
The Future of Evangelicalism in America by Candy Gunther Brown
american-religious-history
histories
history-us
humanism
Dr. Henry Lee's Forensic Files: Five Famous Cases Scott Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, and More...
Henry C. Lee - 2006
Henry C. Lee is considered by many to be the greatest forensic scientist in the world. His vast investigative experience (over 6,000 cases!) and participation in many high-profile trials have earned him not only the highest respect from the law enforcement community but also widespread public recognition. Here Dr. Lee once again gives avid fans of true crime an intimate glimpse into the real world of crime investigation, combining his unparalleled expertise with a clear and lively narrative. Beginning with the infamous Scott Peterson trial, Dr. Lee vividly recounts his investigation of the case, focusing on the crucial issue of physical evidence. As a criminalist who examined the remains of both Laci Peterson and Conner, he brings a distinctive perspective and unique voice to the case. He also weighs in on the verdict. Next, Dr. Lee considers the much-publicized abduction of Elizabeth Smart from her family's Salt Lake City home. After a fruitless ten-month search, Elizabeth was found alive in a Salt Lake City suburb with Brian Mitchell and his wife, both of whom appeared to be mentally unstable. Dr. Lee--who investigated this compelling case--demonstrates the importance of physical evidence in reconstructing this crime. He also describes the role of brainwashing and outlines distinct similarities with the Patty Hearst case. In the final three chapters, Dr. Lee examines the case of a novelist accused of murdering his wife-who had also been the suspected link to a similar death in Germany--where a woman also fatally fell down a flight of stairs; the murder of a man's wife in which both the husband and her lover are considered suspects (with an outcome that is guaranteed to shock!); and the killing of a witness of an accused arsonist shortly before his trial, with a stunning conclusion that derived from Dr. Lee's intriguing investigative work. In each case, Dr. Lee presents -- in addition to an engrossing narrative -- the scientific details of how law enforcement investigated the crime, using the most recent advances in modern forensic tools. This is a fascinating insider's look by a world-renowned expert into the pursuit of justice in some of the most sensational and intriguing criminal cases of recent times.
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
Edward J. Larson - 1997
Yet despite its influence on the 20th century, there are no modern histories of the trial and its aftermath. This book fills that void not only by skillfully narrating the trial's events, but also by framing it in a broader social context, showing how its influence has cut across religious, cultural, educational and political lines. With new material from both the prosecution and the defense, along with the author's astute historical and legal analysis, "Summer for the Gods" is destined to become a new classic about a pivotal milestone in American history.
A Short History of Wisconsin
Erika Janik - 2010
A Short History of Wisconsin recounts the landscapes, people, and traditions that have made the state the multifaceted place it is today. With an approach both comprehensive and accessible, historian Erika Janik covers several centuries of Wisconsin's remarkable past, showing how the state was shaped by the same world wars, waves of new inhabitants, and upheavals in society and politics that shaped the nation.Swift, authoritative, and compulsively readable, A Short History of Wisconsin commences with the glaciers that hewed the region's breathtaking terrain, the Native American cultures who first called it home, and French explorers and traders who mapped what was once called "Mescousing." Janik moves through the Civil War and two world wars, covers advances in the rights of women, workers, African Americans, and Indians, and recent shifts involving the environmental movement and the conservative revolution of the late 20th century. Wisconsin has hosted industries from fur-trapping to mining to dairying, and its political landscape sprouted figures both renowned and reviled, from Fighting Bob La Follette to Joseph McCarthy. Janik finds the story of a state not only in the broad strokes of immigration and politics, but also in the daily lives shaped by work, leisure, sports, and culture. A Short History of Wisconsin offers a fresh understanding of how Wisconsin came into being and how Wisconsinites past and present share a deep connection to the land itself.
The Christian Writer's Manual of Style: Updated and Expanded Edition
Robert Hudson - 2004
Rather than simply repeating style information commonly available in standard references, this newly updated and expanded edition includes points of grammar, punctuation, usage, book production and design, and written style that are often overlooked in other manuals. It focuses on information relating to the unique needs and demands of religious publications, such as discussions on how to correctly quote the Bible, how to capitalize and use common religious terms, and how to abbreviate the books of the Bible and other religious words.Also included are rarely found items such as:• an author’s guide to obtaining permissions• guidelines for using American, British, and Mid-Atlantic styles• discussions of inclusive language, profanity, and ethnic sensitivities• discussions of Internet and computer-related language style• a list of problem words• style issues regarding words from major world religions• a discussion of handling brand names in text• a list of common interjections• issues of type design, paper, copy-fitThis edition has been completely updated since the 1988 edition and contains more than twice as much information as the previous edition. This is the most detailed and comprehensive guide of its kind.
The Hollywood Assistants Handbook: 86 Rules for Aspiring Power Players
Hillary Stamm - 2007
Then leapfrog over everyone else by reading The Hollywood Assistants Handbook. Written by two very sharp and successful assistants to HPPs (Hollywood Power Players), here are 86 lessons packed with a combination of blunt truth, insider humor, and juicy secrets that explain the unwritten rules of how to get a foot in the door and make all the right moves as you climb to the top. Here are the minimum-wage jobs that will put you in the path of HPPs. An annotated resume roundup. The clubs to frequent and the cocktails to order. Movies to watch and books to read (it's called homework). Dressing do's and don'ts. How to get on the Free List. A lineup of boss genres—the Horror Show, the Romantic Comedy, Mr. Action—and how to dodge the tirades that will soon be hurled your way, along with the proper outlets for venting. Plus, the ins and outs of your most important tool, the telephone—when to listen in (always!), who to put through and who to put off, and your new best friend forever, the Plantronics CS70 cordless headset. With its hilariously snarky tone—the gate-keeping quiz is "How to Tell if You're a Moron Who Should Pack Up the Corolla and Move Back Home"—The Hollywood Assistants Handbook is as baldly entertaining for everyone who loves reading about Hollywood as it is indispensably practical for the job-seeker.
God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades
Rodney Stark - 2009
Stark, the author of The Rise of Christianity, reviews the history of the seven major crusades from 1095-1291 in this fascinating work of religious revisionist history.
The Story of Christianity: Volume 1: The Early Church to the Reformation
Justo L. González - 1978
It brings alive the people, dramatic events, and ideas that shaped the first fifteen centuries of Europe, such as the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World. Historian Justo Gonzalez shows how various social, political, and economic movements affected Christianity's internal growth.Gonzalez skillfully weaves in relevant details from the lives of prominent figures from the apostles to John Wycliffe, tracing out core theological issues and developments as reflected in the lives and struggles of leading thinkers within the various traditions of the church. "The history of the church, while showing all the characteristics fo human history, is much more than the history of an institution or movement," Gonzalez stresses. "It is a history of the deeds of the spirit in and through the men and women who have gone before in the faith." The Story of Christianity demonstrates at each point what new challenges and opportunities faced the church, and how Christians struggled with the various options open to them, thereby shaping the future direction of the church.The Story of Christianity will serve as a fascinating introduction to the panoramic history of Christianity for students and teachers of church history, for pastors, and for general readers.
Hemingway's Hurricane
Phil Scott - 2005
Keys residents boarded up their shacks under an ominous sky and sank their skiffs in the mangroves. Atlantic tarpon raced between the Keys to the relative safety of the Gulf of Mexico. In Key West, Ernest Hemingway secured his stone house and his 38-foot boat Pilar against the oncoming storm. And yet, through the long Labor Day Weekend of 1935, the superintendents of three government work camps in the Florida Keys, which housed more than 600 World War I veterans building a highway across the islands, did virtually nothing to evacuate the men in their charge.In Hemingway's Hurricane, author Phil Scott chronicles the days of calamity when the low-lying Upper Florida Keys were stripped bare and submerged by the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the United States. From eyewitness accounts and depositions, he reconstructs the events in each camp as the hurricane made landfall—the terror, bravery, and sacrifices of men left to fend for themselves. He also explores why the train promised from Miami arrived too late to evacuate the men, and why those who tried to escape in their own vehicles were turned back by the National Guard. And he reveals Hemingway's horror when the novelist arrived in his boat two days after the storm to aid the veterans, only to discover that more than 250 had died in the storm, some sand-blasted by fierce winds, others skewered by flying timbers, and many simply blown out to sea.Ernest Hemingway's very public outrage over so many needless deaths spurred a congressional investigation that was widely dismissed as a whitewash. It was also a key factor in landing Hemingway on an FBI watch list, which contributed to his suicide twenty-six years later. In Hemingway's Hurricane, the Depression, bureaucratic failure, the cast-aside soldiers of an earlier war, a great novelist, and a killing storm come together in an American tragedy.The Final BlowThey were the forgotten members of the Lost Generation, traumatized veterans of the Great War who had struggled for years to claw their way back into the American Dream. Described by one journalist as "shell-shocked, Depression-shocked, and whiskey-shocked," they grasped for one last chance at redemption under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Six hundred of them were shuffled off to the Florida Keys to build a highway to Key West. On Labor Day Weekend 1935, the most intense hurricane ever to strike the U.S. took aim on their flimsy shacks, and the two men responsible for evacuating the veterans from harm's way waited too long.After the storm, Ernest Hemingway took his boat from his home in Key West to aid the veterans in the Upper Keys. But he found few survivors among the wreckage and bloated corpses, and his public cries of outrage bound him forever to the storm."Hemingway's Hurricane brilliantly and compellingly captures the events surrounding the 1935 storm, showing how human factors compounded the awful force of sky and sea."
Paul Behaving Badly: Was the Apostle a Racist, Chauvinist Jerk?
E. Randolph Richards - 2016
He was arrogant and stubborn. He called his opponents derogatory, racist names. He legitimized slavery and silenced women. He was a moralistic, homophobic killjoy who imposed his narrow religious views on others. Or was he? Randolph Richards and Brandon O'Brien explore the complicated persona and teachings of the apostle Paul. Unpacking his personal history and cultural context, they show how Paul both offended Roman perspectives and scandalized Jewish sensibilities. His vision of Christian faith was deeply disturbing to those in his day and remains so in ours. Paul behaved badly, but not just in the ways we might think. Take another look at Paul and see why this "worst of sinners" dares to say, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ."
Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America
D.G. Hart - 1994
A study of Machen's thought and career that says much about the issues that unsettled mainstream Protestantism's hold on American intellectual and cultural life.
The Portable Medieval Reader
James Bruce Ross - 1949
The variety, the complexity, the sheer humanity of the middle ages live most meaningfully in their own authentic voices." The Portable Medieval Reader assembles an entire chorus of those voices—of kings, warriors, prelates, merchants, artisans, chroniclers, and scholars—that together convey a lively, intimate impression of a world that might otherwise seem immeasurably alien. All the aspects and strata of medieval society are represented here: the life of monasteries and colleges, the codes of knigthood, the labor of peasants and the privileges of kings. There are contemporary accounts of the persecution of Jews and heretics, of the Crusades in the Holy Land, of courtly pageants, popular uprisings, and the first trade missions to Cathay. We find Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas and Abelard alongside a host of lesser-known writers, discoursing on all the arts, knowledge and speculation of their time. The result, according to the Columbia Record, is a broad and eminetly readable "cross section of source history and literature...as rich and varied as a stained glass window."
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)
David Hackett Fischer - 1989
It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.From 1629 to 1775, North America was settled by four great waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts (1629-1640). The second was the movement of a Royalist elite and indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1649-75). The third was the "Friends' migration,"--the Quakers--from the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a great flight from the borderlands of North Britain and northern Ireland to the American backcountry (ca. 1717-75).These four groups differed in many ways--in religion, rank, generation and place of origin. They brought to America different folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the United States. They spoke distinctive English dialects and built their houses in diverse ways. They had different ideas of family, marriage and gender; different practices of child-naming and child-raising; different attitudes toward sex, age and death; different rituals of worship and magic; different forms of work and play; different customs of food and dress; different traditions of education and literacy; different modes of settlement and association. They also had profoundly different ideas of comity, order, power and freedom which derived from British folk-traditions. Albion's Seed describes those differences in detail, and discusses the continuing importance of their transference to America.Today most people in the United States (more than 80 percent) have no British ancestors at all. These many other groups, even while preserving their own ethnic cultures, have also assimilated regional folkways which were transplanted from Britain to America. In that sense, nearly all Americans today are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnic origins may be; but they are so in their different regional ways. The concluding section of Albion's Seed explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still control attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.Albion's Seed also argues that the four British folkways created an expansive cultural pluralism that has proved to the more libertarian than any single culture alone could be. Together they became the determinants of a voluntary society in the United States.
The Christian Theology Reader
Alister E. McGrath - 1995
Contains 361 readings, drawn from 233 different sources, spread throughout the 2,000 years of Christian history.Exceptionally user-friendly: every reading is accompanied its own introduction, commentary, and study questions.Now includes increased representation of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and women writers.A new section provides a "bird's-eye" view of the historical development of Christian theology, allowing users to locate a reading against its historical context.Additional lecturer resources are available at the accompanying website: www.blackwellpublishing.com/mcgrath.
Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920
John Milton Cooper Jr. - 1990
It was a trying time, however, for many Americans, including women who fought for the vote, blacks who began organizing to secure their rights, and activists on the Left who lost theirs in the first Red Scare of the century.John Cooper's panoramic history of this period shows us where we came from and sheds light on where we are.
The Whole Death Catalog: A Lively Guide to the Bitter End
Harold Schechter - 2009
With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel. Topics include• Death anxiety–is your fear of death normal or off the scale? • You can’t take it with you . . . or can you? Wacky wills and bizarre bequests• The hospice experience–going out in comfort and style• Deathbed and funeral etiquette–how to help the dying and mourn the dead with dignity• Death on demand–why the right-to-die movement may be the next big thing• “Good-bye everybody”–famous last words• The embalmer’s art–all dressed up and nowhere to go• Behind the scenes at your local funeral home• Alternative burial choices–from coral reefs to outer spaceFrom the cold, hard facts of death to lessons in the art of dying well, from what happens in the body’s last living moments to what transpires in the ground or in the furnace, from near-death experiences to speculation on the afterlife, The Whole Death Catalog leaves no gravestone unturned.