A visual and anecdotal exploration of the curious worlds hidden beneath our feet, including ancient cities, salt mine cathedrals, underground amusement parks, and more. From bone-filled catacombs to sculpted salt churches to hand-carved cave complexes large enough to house 20,000 people, Underground Worlds is packed with more than 50 unusual destinations that take some digging to find. Award-winning travel writer David Farley revels in the unexpected, whether it is a cave city in China which houses one of the world's largest collections of Buddhist art or an old salt mine converted into a theme park in Romania. Stunning photos help readers see places they could not even imagine, such as a three-story underground train station in Taiwan that is home to the a 4,500-panel "Dome of Light" that is the largest glasswork on Earth, as well as secret spaces, such as an ornate temple built beneath a suburban home in Italy. Throughout the fascinating text are themed entries of underground systems such as the 2,500-year-old water tunnels of Kish Qanat in Iran or engineering marvels like the New York City steam tunnels.

Subterranean Realms is a unique book that surveys underground and rock cut structures created in the past. It is the third book in Mutton’s trilogy on mysterious realms, the others being Sunken Realms and Water Realms. We know who built some of these astonishing and mysterious structures, but others were built by unknown civilizations in prehistory for reasons that are debated among researchers. Some subterranean structures may have been built for initiation ceremonies or perhaps for acoustic reasons, or both. Mutton discusses such interesting sites as: Derinkuyu, an underground city in Cappadocia, Turkey that housed 20,000 people; Roman catacombs of Domitilla; Palermo Capuchin catacombs; Alexandria catacombs; Paris catacombs; Maltese hypogeum; Rock-cut structures of Petra; Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae; Elephanta Caves, India; Lalibela, Ethiopia; Tarquinia Etruscan necropolis; Hallstatt salt mine; Beijing air raid shelters; Japanese high command Okinawa tunnels; more. There are tons of illustrations in this fascinating book!

While Dostoevsky’s relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake’s ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship. Previous commentators have traced a wide-ranging hostility in Dostoevsky’s understanding of Catholicism to his Slavophilism. Blake depicts a far more nuanced picture. Her close reading demonstrates that he is repelled and fascinated by Catholicism in all its medieval, Reformation, and modern manifestations. Dostoevsky saw in Catholicism not just an inspirational source for the Grand Inquisitor but a political force, an ideological wellspring, a unique mode of intellectual inquiry, and a source of cultural production. Blake’s insightful textual analysis is accompanied by an equally penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century European revolutionary history, from Paris to Siberia, that undoubtedly influenced the evolution of Dostoevsky’s thought.

Some illustrations. An inspiring dramatic account of the colorful and courageous life and death of the martyr, St. Edmund Campion, "hero of God's underground" during the persecution of Catholics in England in the 1500's.

With over 60 per cent of the world’s population living in cities, the networks beneath our feet – which keep the cities above moving – are more important than ever before. Yet we never truly see how these amazing feats of engineering work. Just how deep do the tunnels go? Where do the sewers, bunkers and postal trains run? And, how many tunnels are there under our streets? Each featured city presents a ‘skyline of the underground’ through specially commissioned cut-away illustrations and unique cartography. Drawing on geography, cartography and historical oddities, Mark Ovenden explores what our cities look like from the bottom up.

In Subterranean Twin Cities, geologist, historian, and urban speleologist Greg Brick takes us on an adventurous, educational, and-thankfully-sanitary journey beneath the streets and into the myriad tunnels, caves, and industrial spaces that make up the Twin Cities' fascinating and surprisingly vast underground landscape. In this groundbreaking tour, the first of its kind of the Twin Cities, Brick mines the stories that lie below the city surface.

When the more than eighteen million visitors poured into the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, they encountered a vision of the world born out of San Francisco’s particular local political and social climate. By seeking to please various constituent groups ranging from the government of Japan to local labor unions and neighborhood associations, fair organizers generated heated debate and conflict about who and what represented San Francisco, California, and the United States at the world’s fair. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition encapsulated the social and political tensions and conflicts of pre–World War I California and presaged the emergence of San Francisco as a cosmopolitan cultural and economic center of the Pacific Rim. Empress San Francisco offers a fresh examination of this, one of the largest and most influential world’s fairs, by considering the local social and political climate of Progressive Era San Francisco. Focusing on the influence exerted by women, Asians and Asian Americans, and working-class labor unions, among others, Abigail M. Markwyn offers a unique analysis both of this world’s fair and the social construction of pre–World War I America and the West.