In this intriguing book, best-selling author Alf Mapp, Jr. explores three periods in Western history that exploded with creativity: Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence, and America's founding. What enabled these societies to make staggering jumps in scientific knowledge, develop new political structures, or create timeless works of art?

The Golden Age is Grand Space Opera, a large-scale SF adventure novel in the tradition of A. E. Van vogt and Roger Zelazny, with perhaps a bit of Cordwainer Smith enriching the style. It is an astounding story of super science, a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the excitements of SF's golden age writers. The Golden Age takes place 10,000 years in the future in our solar system, an interplanetary utopian society filled with immortal humans. Within the frame of a traditional tale-the one rebel who is unhappy in utopia-Wright spins an elaborate plot web filled with suspense and passion. Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious party at his family mansion to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the High Transcendence. There he meets first an old man who accuses him of being an impostor and then a being from Neptune who claims to be an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that essential parts of his memory were removed and stored by the very government that Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable. It shakes his faith. He is an exile from himself. And so Phaethon embarks upon a quest across the transformed solar system--Jupiter is now a second sun, Mars and Venus terraformed, humanity immortal--among humans, intelligent machines, and bizarre life forms that are partly both, to recover his memory, and to learn what crime he planned that warranted such preemptive punishment. His quest is to regain his true identity. The Golden Age is one of the major, ambitious SF novels of the year and the international launch of an important new writer in the genre. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Dagomar Degroot offers the first detailed analysis of how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that reached its chilliest point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighboring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. By tracing the occasionally counterintuitive manifestations of climate change from global to local scales, Degroot finds that the Little Ice Age presented not only challenges for Dutch citizens but also opportunities that they aggressively exploited in conducting commerce, waging war, and creating culture. The overall success of their Republic in coping with climate change offers lessons that we would be wise to heed today, as we confront the growing crisis of global warming.

The conviction that Nature was God's second revelation played a crucial role in early modern Dutch culture. This book offers a fascinating account on how Dutch intellectuals contemplated, investigated, represented and collected natural objects, and how the notion of the 'Book of Nature' was transformed.

Beginning with The Golden Age, continuing with The Phoenix Exultant and now concluding in The Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright's grand space opera is a SF adventure saga in the tradition of A. E. van Vogt and Roger Zelazny. It is an astounding story of super-science, a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the excitements of SF's golden agewriters in the suspenseful and passionate tale of a lone rebel unhappy in utopia. The end of the Millennium is imminent, when all minds, human, posthuman, cybernetic, sophotechnic, will be temporarily merged into one solar-system-spanning supermind called the Transcendence. This is not only the fulfillment of a thousand years of dreams, it is a day of doom, when the universal mind will pass judgment on all the races of humanity and transhumanity. The mighty ship Phoenix Exultant is at last in the hands of her master; Phaethon the Exile is at her helm. But the terrible truth has been revealed: he is being hunted by the agents from a long-lost dead star, the eerie and deadly Lords of the Silent Oecumene, whose super-technology plumbs depths even the all-knowing Earthmind cannot fathom. Humanity will be helpless during the Golden Transcendence. Phaethon's enemies plan to use the opportunity to destroy the population of the Inner System, man and machine alike. To do this, they must take control of Phaethon's beloved starship and turn her unparalleled power to warlike uses. Phaethon's memories are incomplete - but he knows a spy for the Silent Ones is already aboard. And when the all-encompassing Mind of the Golden Transcendence wakes - who will it condemn? Which future will it chose? Are Phaethon's dreams of star-flight about to revolutionize the Golden Age into an age even more glorious than gold, or will they kindle the first open war fought across the immensity of interstellar space? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The truth behind ancient myths and the return of the celestial conditions for a Golden Age of peace and abundance • Reveals the events preserved in myth that launched humanity into 12,000 years of struggle, selfishness, and false beliefs • Explores how we can initiate a new Golden Age through ancient Egyptian teachings on the creative power of our imaginations • Explains how our world system of economics, which benefits a few at the expense of the many, arose as a reaction to global catastrophe in prehistory Since the beginning of recorded history humanity has been in a continuous struggle over land and resources. It continues today despite the abundance we have created through scientific innovation and technology. Why such a struggle for resources exists has never been explained. Neither has the human drive to own, accumulate, and hoard. Edward Malkowski reveals that the answer lies in recognizing the reality behind humanity’s earliest myths. He shows that the opportunity is at hand to transcend these inherited selfish traits and return to a Golden Age of peace and abundance. Malkowski explores the hidden meaning behind stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato’s Atlantis, and myths of a new sky and a new sun, of great floods and the death of the gods, and of the preceding Golden Age. He connects these myths to a real extinction event that occurred 12,000 years ago. He explains how the survivors--our ancestors--were catapulted from utopia into a world of scarcity, scarring the collective mind of humanity and initiating the struggle for resources in an attempt to regain our lost paradise. He shows how our world system of economics, focused on ownership and based on the false belief of separateness--benefitting a few at the expense of the many--arose as a reaction to this catastrophe. Drawing on the pre-catastrophe teachings preserved by the ancient Egyptians, Malkowski reveals that we are returning to a celestial configuration parallel to that of the past Golden Age. Through our collective DNA memory and the creative power of our imaginations, we can end our 12,000-year quest to regain paradise lost and launch a new Golden Age of unity, abundance, and equality for all humanity.

A collaborative effort by scholars from the United States, China, and Japan, this volume focuses on the period 1972–1989, during which all three countries, brought together by a shared geopolitical strategy, established mutual relations with one another despite differences in their histories, values, and perceptions of their own national interest. Although each initially conceived of its political and security relations with the others in bilateral terms, the three in fact came to form an economic and political triangle during the 1970s and 1980s. But this triangle is a strange one whose dynamics are constantly changing. Its corners (the three countries) and its sides (the three bilateral relationships) are unequal, while its overall nature (the capacity of the three to work together) has varied considerably as the economic and strategic positions of the three have changed and post–Cold War tensions and uncertainties have emerged.

Essays by American and Dutch scholars and museum curators explore the collecting and reception of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in America, from the colonial era through the Gilded Age to today.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s dynamic history of Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. Winner of the Carnegie Medal. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit is a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. The story is told through the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—a close relationship that strengthens both men before it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that divides their wives, their children, and their closest friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the Republican Party, causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected, and changing the country’s history. The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S.S. McClure. Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men. The Bully Pulpit, like Goodwin’s brilliant chronicles of the Civil War and World War II, exquisitely demonstrates her distinctive ability to combine scholarly rigor with accessibility. It is a major work of history—an examination of leadership in a rare moment of activism and reform that brought the country closer to its founding ideals.