The story of the crusades has been told and retold in Western histories—but invariable from Western perspectives. Carole Hillenbrand’s fresh interpretation drew on Islamic sources that describe the crusades from a Muslim point of view.

Slavery had been accepted in Western culture for centuries. So why did a movement suddenly rise up in the industrial era calling for its abolition? Could it be that people had suddenly become more enlightened and humanitarian? Or were there other, more compelling and perhaps self-serving reasons for this sudden about-turn?

Born in 1858, Franz Boas permanently changed the standards and practices of anthropology. His 1940 work Race, Language and Culture brings together a half-century's worth of ground-breaking scholarship in one volume.

Do we need religion to be good people? When Immanuel Kant tackled this question in 1793, he produced a book that remains a key text in the shaping of Western religious thought.

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy - not to mention one of the most challenging. Its topic is the nature of human knowledge, and the question of whether or not it is possible to have knowledge of the world at all.

Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings between 1500 and 1800 in both Europe and Asia. Many thinkers previously believed that Europe's distinctive history-particularly the rise of capitalism-had created the revolutions that launched its path to global supremacy.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer, writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer, writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist.

In their 1990 work, Gottfredson and Hirschi introduce a new and comprehensive theory of crime. At the time, crime researchers tended to focus on environmental factors that led to crime, not on the criminals themselves, and were inclined to think about crime only from their particular academic perspective. Ideas about what caused crime, and how to prevent it, were often in conflict.

Though written more than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince is still both widely read and very influential. Readers turn to it for its direct advice on the question of how to attain - and retain - power.