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(0)Jo Anna Perrin
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Summary
Historian Carol Berkin's A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution is a rich narrative portrait of post-revolutionary America and the men who shaped its political future.
"Just as the Constitution was a brilliant solution to the problems of the 1780s, Carol Berkin's book is a brilliant account of the making of that constitution. Written with great verve and clarity, it nicely captures all the contingency and unpredictability in...
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The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different-and far more interesting-as revealed in this new history. In The Silk Road, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionize our understanding of these trade routes....
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Confessing to "familiarity with the devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events at Salem. More than three hundred years later, the question "Why?" still haunts us....
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Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, Lauren Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.