Published in 1938, The Black Jacobins tells the story of the only successful slave revolution in history-an uprising inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. The long struggle of African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804.

The Sociological Imagination provoked hostile reaction when it appeared for its hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced, and on several leading sociologists.

One of the most reprinted articles in the history of the Harvard Business Review, "The Core Competence of the Corporation" challenged and redefined traditional concepts of management strategy in an increasingly global and competitive market. Prahalad and Hamel base their 1990 argument on a comparison of case studies.

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity is a perfect example of one of the most effective aspects of critical thinking skills: the use of reasoning to build a strong, logical argument.

C.S. Lewis's 1943 The Abolition of Man is subtitled 'Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools.'

When Manias, Panics, and Crashes was published (1978), the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally and often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language.

Structural Anthropology (1958) not only transformed the discipline of anthropology, it also energized a movement called structuralism that came to dominate the humanities and social sciences for a generation.

Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians.

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 1961, US anthropologist and activist David Graeber was weaned on leftist politics, and declared himself an anarchist at age 16.