17th century

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.

Traces four hundred years of Jewish history from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and discusses the anti-semitism facing European Jews, the Jews of czarist Russia, their struggle for civil rights in the 1830s and 1840s, Jewish life in America, the effects of World War One and the Holocaust of World War Two, and much more.

Chronicles Olof Rudbeck's efforts to prove that the lost civilization of Atlantis really did exist and explores how the world responded to his claims.

Explores the mysterious work of seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, and examines his mathematical theories and his understanding of the order and mystery of the cosmos.

Chronicles the stormy collaboration between astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler at the turn of the seventeenth century, discussing how their discoveries would mark the transition from medieval to modern science and why Kepler is believed to have killed Brahe in order to take credit for Brahe's discoveries.

Chronicles Robert Hooke's efforts to rebuild London during the 1670s, after he was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire of 1666.

Explores the major developments in art and architecture that emerged in seventeenth-century Western Europe, discussing how the socio-political and cultural atmosphere of the century influenced design, profiling the careers of significant painters, sculptors, and architects, and highlighting legendary creations from the time.