"From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa Maria's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island off Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to fantasies projected from without by the West, and viewed as a place to be consumed. It stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than 300 years. Its societies were shaped by mass migrations and forced labor from the 16th century onwards, imposed by European or latterly-American imperial...

"This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,'...

This volume is a biography on English poet and playwright, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. In this work, the author attempts to provide a vivid and plausible version of the undocumented areas of Shakespeare's life. The author intends to demonstrate how an acutely sensitive and talented boy -- surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life,...

"Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cutural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone...

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music." --

Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...

"Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism"--

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. It is his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; tender memories of his first wife, Hadley; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. It is a literary feast, brilliantly evoking the exuberant mood of Paris...

"A history of European intellectual life from 500 AD to 1700 AD"--