Late Middle Ages-Rebirth, Waning, Calamity? 2. Philip the Fair versus Boniface VIII 3. Fall of the Templars and the Avignon Papacy 4. The Great Papal Schism 5. The Hundred Years War, Part 1 6. The Hundred Years War, Part 2 7. The Black Death, Part 1 8. The Black Death, Part 2 9. Revolt in Town and Country 10. William Ockham 11. John Wycliffe and the Lollards 12. Jan Hus and the Hussite Rebellion 13. Witchcraft 14. Christine de Pizan and Catherine of Siena 15. Gunpowder 16. The Printing Press 17. Renaissance Humanism, Part 1 18. Renaissance Humanism, Part 2 19. The Fall of the Byzantine Empire 20. Ferdinand and Isabella 21. The Spanish Inquisition 22. The Age of Exploration 23. Columbus and the Columbian Exchange 24. When Did the Middle Ages End? Late Middle Ages (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)Course No. 8296 Taught by Philip DaileaderThe College of William and MaryPh.D., Harvard University

    Take an adventurous trek to these wilds of South America and the great civilizations of the ancients. In 24 eye-opening lectures, you'll take an in-depth look at the emerging finds and archaeological knowledge of more than 12 seminal civilizations, giving you rich insight into the creative vision and monumental achievements of these wellsprings of human life. The ancient South Americans show us striking models of how societies can function and organize themselves. The technologies and social structures seen here were wholly invented, using no preexisting models, as these dynamic peoples struggled to tame their environment and carve out societies and empires. Recently unearthed marvels include elaborately prepared and adorned mummies that predate Egypt's by 2000 years; imposing palaces, solar observatories, and dramatically decorated pyramids; stunning art objects in gold, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and ceramic; and evidence of huge urban civilizations in the Amazon. In their amazing sophistication and scale, the sites reveal some of the most remarkable ancient artifacts found anywhere in the world. The breathtaking valleys, mountains, and deserts you will study in this course reveal wonders that rival anything we know of the ancient world. Travel with us to a lost and splendorous past - a fountainhead of civilization that speaks unforgettably of human striving, vision, and the indomitable will to endure.Listening Length: 11 hours and 54 minutes

    CBT illuminates the links between thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physical health and uses those connections to develop concrete plans for self-improvement. Built on a solid foundation of neurological and behavioral research, CBT is an approach almost anyone can use for promoting greater mental health and improving quality of life. In 24 engaging half-hour lectures, you'll build a robust and effective self-improvement toolkit with the expert guidance of Professor Satterfield of the University of California, San Francisco. You will explore CBT's roots in Socratic and stoic philosophy, build a toolkit of CBT techniques, and hear about the latest research about its outcomes. Additionally this intriguing and practical course allows you to take on the role of medical student, physician, psychologist, and patient. Throughout the course you'll explore issues that cause people to seek out therapy. In some cases you'll get to hear Dr. Satterfield working with a patient, and in others you'll be delving into research to find what causes issues and how CBT helps to resolve them. Everyone has something about their life that they would like to improve. With the tools in CBT and the desire to make your situation better, you can create lasting change in your life.

    It’s because constitutional law is so fundamental to our democracy that law schools across the country teach the subject. It's the area of law that determines what federal and state governments are permitted to do, and what rights you have as an individual citizen of the United States. In these 12 lectures, you'll get the same accessible, well-rounded introduction to constitutional law as a typical law student - but with the added benefit of noted constitutional scholar Eric Berger's brilliant insights. Taking you through all three branches of the federal government, Professor Berger uses some of the most important legal cases in the United States to probe the open-ended nature of the Constitution’s language and illustrate how legal reasoning has defined the power relationships that the Constitution governs. You’ll examine pivotal Supreme Court cases to learn how interpreting the Constitution has radically affected American society. You’ll consider the Supreme Court’s role in deciding - and sometimes avoiding - questions of constitutionality. And you’ll investigate how changes in public opinion can influence how the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. While the open-ended nature of the Constitution’s language makes constitutional law often uncertain, these lectures offer you a better understanding of its many nuances, as well as its profound importance for the future of the United States.

    Covering the latest research findings-from the origins of music's emotional powers to the deficits involved in amusia, or the inability to hear music-these 18 enthralling half-hour lectures will make you think about music and your brain in a new way. "Ani's series of lectures hit all the right notes. A gifted and engaging guide, he delivers an extraordinarily comprehensive and accessible dive into the most fascinating topics in the neuroscience of music. Watch all of these and you'll know what one of the greatest minds in the field has to say about the exciting world of music and the brain." -Daniel J. Levitin, Author of This Is Your Brain On Music and Professor of neuroscience and music, McGill University Designed for music lovers and brain enthusiasts at all levels, Music and the Brain assumes no prior background in the subject. The course is truly interdisciplinary, covering fundamental ideas of music theory, neuroanatomy, and cognitive science, while spotlighting the diverse range of experiments, discoveries, and debates in this fast-changing field.

     Her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these new scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies -- body-minds -- in ways we could never possibly have imagined before. Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.

    In those heady early days of computing, Britannia very much ruled the digital waves.Electronic Dreams looks back at how Britain embraced the home computer, and at the people who drove the boom: entrepreneurs such as Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar seeking new markets; politicians proclaiming economic miracles; bedroom programmers with an unhealthy fascination with technology; and millions of everyday folk who bought into the electronic dream and let the computer into their lives. It is a history of home computers such as the Commodore VIC20, BBC Micro, and ZX Spectrum; classic computer games like Manic Miner and Elite; the early information networks that first put the home online; and the transformation of the computer into an everyday object in the British home.Based on interviews with key individuals, archive sources, and study of vintage hardware and software, and with a particular focus on the computer's place in social history, Electronic Dreams is a nostalgic look at how a depressed 1980s Britain got over its fear of microchips and embraced the computer as a “passport to the future.”

    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.

    •Practice exercises are given at the end of chapter included conceptual questions & multiple choice questions with hints, answer & solutions. •Multiple choice questions with single correct and more the one correct answers, Comprehension based questions, Assertion-Reason, Matching Type questions, etc. •Every reaction is explained mechanistically for subject understanding. •Solutions are given at the end of every chapter for clear the concepts.

    Professor Weil introduces you to masterpieces such as Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Gogol's Dead Souls, Chekhov's The Seagull, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and many other great novels, stories, plays, and poems. In all, you plunge into more than 40 works by a dozen writers, from Aleksandr Pushkin in the 19th century to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the 20th century. You also investigate the origin of Russian literature itself, which traces its lineage back to powerful epic poetry and beautiful renderings of the Bible into Slavic during the Middle Ages. All of these works are treated in translation, but Professor Weil does something very unusual in the literature-in-translation arena. For almost every passage that he quotes in English, he reads an extract in the original Russian, with a fluent accent and an actor's sense of drama.

    Their subjects include the components, function, and weight of the atmosphere; capillary attraction; the carbon content in oxygen and living bodies; respiration and its analogy to the burning of a candle; and much more. Numerous illustrations.

    For example, the chapter on how buildings work introduces static and dynamic forces in explaining why buildings (and their foundations) don't sink into the ground and why skyscrapers don't blow over in strong winds. The chapter on bicycles explores how "a couple of more or less empty circles (better known as wheels) with a few flimsy bits of metal (spokes) stretched between them" are able to support your weight-and this leads into a discussion of compression, tension, and how gears work.After reading Atoms Under the Floorboards, you'll never look at everyday objects the same way again.Shortlisted for the Physics World Book of the Year (2015).

    It has been named the best science book ever by the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and is considered to be Levi's crowning achievement.

    The answer to this age-old riddle is universally relevant to our lives. The implications of our views on it can affect everything from small choices we make every day to our perspective on criminal justice and capital punishment. From the Stoics to Boethius, from Kant to Hume, from Sartre to contemporary philosophers, great minds have puzzled over this debate for centuries.Now you can learn the intriguing details of this fundamental philosophical question with Great Philosophical Debates: Free Will and Determinism, 24 fascinating lectures by Shaun Nichols, award-winning Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona."The Great Courses.com

    They speak their own language, they abide by their own rules, and they seem to exist to drive adults crazy. But adolescence is a typical stage of human development that is the essential preparation for success in the adult world. The more you understand about your teen’s brain, the better prepared you will be to handle this turbulent time in your child’s life.Professor Abigail Baird has devoted the majority of her career to studying adolescence, and in this Audible Original, she shares the latest perspectives on this amazing time of cognitive and behavioral growth. The 10 lectures in this series will reveal that adolescent behavior is much easier to understand than most people think. Rather than seeing the teen years as a crucible to be endured by parents and young people alike, this series offers a practical perspective for adults who hope to help teens truly thrive in their personal journeys to adulthood—not merely to survive their adolescence.Whether you are a parent, someone who works with teens, or even a teen yourself, this course will shed new light on a period of human development that is all too often incorrectly described as a time where psychological peril is inevitable.