U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

Since its inception in Roman Catholic Spain in the 1940s, the Cursillo movement has been a steadily-growing phenomenon and has spread into many Protestant churches worldwide under various names. The weekend initiation is often a deeply-felt experience that boasts of many conversions and recommitments. Yet in this comprehensive analysis of Cursillo the author finds theological concerns, questions about the propriety of the methods, and complications such as disaffection from the local church, transfer of loyalty to the Cursillo community, and a significant drop-out rate, raising implications for similar, spiritual movements. Interviews with former Cursillo participants confirmed many of these conclusions but also raised a challenge to the church: many Cursillo participants do not perceive vital faith in their local church. The author suggests that the Cursillo attempts to imitate the work of the church in an extraordinary form and that this might initiate some of the unhelpful results. The church would be better served by seeking to revitalize its ordinary ministries of Word and sacrament, prayer, community, and Sabbath observance.

The Age of Psychopharmacology began with a brilliant rise in the 1950s, when for the first time science entered the study of drugs that affect the brain and mind. But, esteemed historian Edward Shorter argues that there has been a recent fall, as the field has seen its drug offerings impoverished and its diagnoses distorted by the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." The new drugs, such as Prozac, have been less effective than the old. The new diagnoses, such as "major depression," have strayed increasingly from the real disorders of most patients. Behind this disaster has been the invasion of the field by the pharmaceutical industry. This invasion has paid off commercially but not scientifically: There have been no new classes of psychiatry drugs in the last thirty years. Given that psychiatry's diagnoses and therapeutics have largely failed, the field has greatly declined from earlier days. Based on extensive research discovered in litigation, Shorter provides a historical perspective of change and decline over time, concluding that the story of the psychopharmacology is a story of a public health disaster.

Most materials and crystals have an atomic structure which is described by a regular stacking of a microscopic fundamental unit, the unit cell. However, there are also many well ordered materials without such a unit cell. This book deals with the structure determination and a discussion of the main special properties of these materials.