17th century

From plantation owners' wives to indentured servants, women in the colonies had varied duties that readers will find fascinating in this format.

Explains that William Shakespeare lived during the first phase of the Scientific Revolution, discusses the Renaissance thinkers who lived near Shakespeare, and how these new ideas impacted his works.

The African Kingdom of Kom included a narrow gorge which opened into a smoky blue chasm in the distance, the Valley of Too Many Bends, which rested at a terrible crossroads, with no forest to hide in, when the marauders arrived. The kings may have been safe in their fortified isolation, but their people were not. They were taken first by Arab invaders in the Sudan in the north, and then by the southern peoples who found that humans were the commodity Europeans most desired. Those who survived had been handed from tribe to tribe, through too many hostile foreign territories to dream of escaping and returning home. As the author sat high on a ridge, three hundred miles from the Atlantic, he imagined his ancestor flowing away like the rivers below, across the ocean, into the swampy, malarial settlement called Jamestown, where he would be sold to a planter in 1644.

Text and photographs look at how kids lived in Colonial America.

"Lucy Campion, formerly a ladies' maid in the local magistrate's household, has now found gainful employment as a printer's apprentice. On a freezing winter afternoon in 1667, she accompanies the magistrate's daughter, Sarah, to the home of a severely injured Quaker man to record his dying words, a common practice in 17th century England. The man, having been trampled by a horse and cart the night before, only has a few hours left to live. Lucy scribbles down the Quaker man's last utterances, but she's unprepared for what he reveals to her--that someone deliberately pushed him into the path of the horse, because of a secret he had recently uncovered. Fearful that Sarah might be traveling in the company of a murderer, Lucy feels compelled to seek the truth, with the help of the magistrate's son, Adam, and the local constable. But delving into the dead man's background might prove more dangerous than any of them had imagined. In The Masque of a Murderer, Susanna Calkins has once again combined finely wrought characters, a richly detailed historical atmosphere, and a tightly-plotted mystery into a compelling read"--.

As Europe's religious, social, economic, and cultural identity began to take more definite shape in the medieval and Renaissance eras, so too did its literary identity. By capturing in ink the spirit of these transformative periods, such literary giants laid the foundations for literature, drama, and poetry today.

Reason, rationality, and reform were perhaps the biggest buzzwords of the Enlightenment era and the themes of much of the writing that appeared at that time. As thinkers increasingly began turning a critical eye towards accepted beliefs and practices to illuminate the social injustices and injuries to personal freedom that pervaded their societies.