International Studies

In The Age of Revolution, renowned British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the historical period from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th. He concludes that the "dual revolutions" of the time - the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution - changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era.

What is the nature of our personal relationship with God? That's the core question of Fear and Trembling. If God asks us to do something we instinctively feel is unethical, must we obey and have faith that he knows best? Examining this question, Danish philosopher Kierkegaard considers the biblical story in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. His unique reading of the story breaks new ground, focusing on our relationship with God at an individual level.

American author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 work, Hitler's Willing Executioners, is one of the most controversial history books of modern times. While most historians have sought to explain the horror of the Holocaust by focusing on Nazi leaders and their ideologies, Goldhagen set out to investigate whether ordinary Germans enthusiastically embraced their goals. His conclusion: "eliminationist anti-Semitism" - a genocidal hatred of Jews unique to Germany - caused the Holocaust.

History of the Peloponnesian War was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine influences. It introduced instead a critical method of looking to the facts of human actions as the basis of our understanding - a method that continues to be used today, more than two millennia later. Many of the most important political thinkers in the Western tradition cite Thucydides as an influence, and major figures including Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche have praised his writing.

On the Genealogy of Morality was written in 1887 when Friedrich Nietzsche was at the height of his powers as a philosopher and master of German prose writing. Here, he criticizes the idea that there is just one conception of moral goodness, dissecting the contemporary practice of morality and looking at it from a historical viewpoint. Rather than following a metaphysical or religious approach, Nietzsche adopts a naturalistic framework, which is grounded in history and natural science, to understand our concepts of good and evil in the Christianized Western world.

Democracy and Its Critics is a modern classic that integrates Robert A. Dahl's democratic thinking as it developed over the course of his academic career. It makes an important contribution to theories about democracy and remains widely cited and debated. Dahl offers an interpretation of democratic theory and practice that is relevant to the modern world and that pays special attention to the problems highlighted by people who criticize democracy.

First published in 1651, Leviathan drove important discussions about where kings get their authority to rule and what those kings must, in turn, do for their people. This is known as the "social contract". Thomas Hobbes wrote the book while exiled from his native England following the English Civil War that unseated King Charles I. In the face of England's radical - if temporary - rejection of its monarchy, Hobbes wanted to explain why it was important to have a strong central government, which in his time meant having a sovereign at its head.

De Beauvoir's book charted the oppression of "the second sex" in terms never before seen in the academic world. Her most startling theory became a rallying cry for the feminist movement: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She argued that gender identity was shaped by upbringing in a world ruled by men. A leading light in the existentialist movement, de Beauvoir applied the radical philosophy of personal choice and freedom to argue that women were subjugated in every area of life.

German-born thinker Theodore Levitt's groundbreaking 1960 article Marketing Myopia established him as a world-famous business figure and led to him being dubbed "the father of modern marketing." At the time he published the piece, marketing did not even exist as a separate business discipline. Recognizing that companies went bust when the market for their products dried up, Levitt set to finding out why. He wrote Marketing Myopia as a manifesto.

Stanley Milgram was a young researcher at Yale in the 1960s when he recruited volunteers to help in a psychology experiment. These volunteers were asked to give electric shocks to "learners" whenever they got an answer to a question wrong. The "learners" were in on the deception, and were not actually receiving shocks, but the volunteers were unaware of this. To widespread surprise, Milgram reported that 40 to 65 percent of his volunteers did what the researcher told them, and gave the maximum shock to the "learners" even when they screamed in pain.

Plato imagines a dinner party - a symposium - held in the Athens of the late fifth century BC. He invites seven important historical figures including the philosopher Socrates, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and the notorious military general Alcibiades. As entertainment, each guest gives a speech praising eros (human love or erotic desire). Plato then "collects" these seven speeches into Symposium.

Written more than 2,000 years ago, this earliest surviving work on how to wage war successfully - and above all, rationally - argues that winning requires careful advance planning, better sources of information than your opponent, and a strategy that's flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions. Sun Tzu concludes that in the end, a decision not to take military action can be every bit as sensible and effective as being able to triumph on the battlefield.

It was the vast frontier stretching out to the west of the developed land on the North American continent that shaped the American character - and the course of US history. That's the argument in historian Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". Anthologized and reprinted many times, it gave historians a new lens with which to analyze the United States.

Michel Foucault had already written extensively about medicine, madness, and prisons. But in the latter days of his career, he turned to the subject of sexuality, planning six volumes on the subject. He completed three before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is a study of the evolution of cultural ideas about sex in the West since the end of the 17th century. Volume two looked at attitudes toward sex in ancient Greece; volume three investigated sex in ancient Rome.

Religion and the Decline of Magic examines popular belief in 16th and 17th century England, a key period during which leaders of the Protestant Reformation tried to disentangle magic from religion itself. Thomas argues that magic was popular because it offered practical solutions to everyday problems. Few social historians had examined the popular religious beliefs of the 1500s at the time Thomas wrote Religion.

This presentation of the Bible is set to an original musical underscore performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra and a Hollywood-style sound design created by Technicolor Studios. Listen as the voices of Denzel and Pauletta Washington (Song of Songs), Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Angela Bassett (Esther), Tyler Perry, LL Cool J (Samson), Tyrese Gibson, Terry Crews, Eartha Kitt (Serpent), Common, Tia and Tamera Mowry, Vanessa Williams, Keke Palmer, Forest Whitaker (Moses), and featuring Samuel L. Jackson as God in the New Testament, bring the stories and lessons of the Bible to life.

This presentation of the Bible is set to an original musical underscore performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra and a Hollywood-style sound design created by Technicolor Studios. Listen as the voices of Denzel and Pauletta Washington (Song of Songs), Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Angela Bassett (Esther), Tyler Perry, LL Cool J (Samson), Tyrese Gibson, Terry Crews, Eartha Kitt (Serpent), Common, Tia and Tamera Mowry, Vanessa Williams, Keke Palmer, Forest Whitaker (Moses), and featuring Samuel L. Jackson as God in the New Testament, bring the stories and lessons of the Bible to life.

Jesus’ parables. They are widely known–or at least often referenced. But does that mean they are well understood? Having slipped into the lingua franca of our day, we could be missing some of what He was communicating. If familiarity breeds contempt, perhaps our sense that we know these stories insulates us from what Jesus was saying about life with God.

Albert Hourani's 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late 20th century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous examinations, Hourani integrates a wide range of scholarship to provide a deep analysis of social, cultural, and economic structures. His interest in the everyday lives of Arab people and his desire to understand what united - rather than divided - many different nationalities gives listeners a new and vital perspective on the region.

This presentation of the Bible is set to an original musical underscore performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra and a Hollywood-style sound design created by Technicolor Studios. Listen as the voices of Denzel and Pauletta Washington (Song of Songs), Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Angela Bassett (Esther), Tyler Perry, LL Cool J (Samson), Tyrese Gibson, Terry Crews, Eartha Kitt (Serpent), Common, Tia and Tamera Mowry, Vanessa Williams, Keke Palmer, Forest Whitaker (Moses), and featuring Samuel L. Jackson as God in the New Testament, bring the stories and lessons of the Bible to life.