In July 1916, Fritz Mandelbaum, a junior officer in Austria's Seventh Army on the Russian front near the river Dnjestr, was shot in the abdomen and died shortly thereafter. Twenty four years later the name suffered erasure again. This time it was borne by a refugee boy arriving in New York in 1940. His father changed the family's name. Fritz Mandelbaum became Frederic Morton. The present book deals with the events, ideas, unpredictabilities and inevitabilities surrounding the death of the next Crown Prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It set off the dynamics leading the World War II.

This full color atlas depicts structures in the same colors as they would appear in real life or in a slide. To facilitate identification, there are color differentiations within each structure and leadered labels pointing to specific parts. There are over 575 illustrations.

From that cheerful puff of smoke known as Casper to the hunkiest potter living or dead, Sam Wheat, there is probably no more iconic entity in supernatural history than the ghost. And these are just recent examples. From the earliest writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to today’s ghost-hunting reality TV shows, ghosts have chilled the air of nearly every era and every culture in human history. In this book, Lisa Morton uses her scholarly prowess—more powerful than any proton pack—to wrangle together history’s most enduring ghosts into an entertaining and comprehensive look at what otherwise seems to always evade our eyes.  
           
Tracing the ghost’s constantly shifting contours, Morton asks the most direct question—What exactly is a ghost?—and examines related entities such as poltergeists, wraiths, and revenants. She asks how a ghost is related to a soul, and she outlines all the different kinds of ghosts there are. To do so, she visits the spirits of the classical world, including the five-part Egyptian soul and the first haunted-house, conceived in the Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy, Mostellaria. She confronts us with the frightening phantoms of the Middle Ages—who could incinerate priests and devour children—and reminds us of the nineteenth-century rise of Spiritualism, a religion essentially devoted to ghosts. She visits with the Indian bhuta and goes to the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, and of course she spends time in Mexico, where ghosts have a particularly strong grip on belief and culture. Along the way she gathers the ectoplasmic residues seeping from books and film reels, from the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto to the 2007 blockbuster Paranormal Activity, from the stories of Ann Radcliffe to those of Stephen King.
           
Wide-ranging, informative, and slicked with over fifty unearthly images, Ghosts is an entertaining read of a cultural phenomenon that will delight anyone, whether they believe in ghosts or not.

Is women's destiny rooted in their biology? Since the end of the eighteenth century the science of gynecology has legitimized the view that women are "naturally" fitted for activities in the private sphere of the family. This book argues that the definition of femininity as propounded by gynecological science is a cultural product of a wider, more political context. Providing a unique account of gynecology in practice, it shifts the historical focus from the use to the production of ideas about "women's nature." Dr. Moscucci traces the origins of gynecology to the emergence of a predictable "science of man" in the late eighteenth century and charts the ideological, professional and institutional development of the subject up to the foundation of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1929. Case-studies of Victorian gynecological practice at two London hospitals illustrate the changing pattern of institutional gynecology, affording valuable insight into the relationship between gynecologists and patients. The book also stresses the equal importance of class and gender ideology in shaping medical views about women's diseases and their treatment.

Generally agreed to be one of the most important contributors to Art Nouveau, the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha was trained, celebrated and lived most of his life in Paris. His unforgettably iconic images of Sarah Bernhardt and others embody the spirit of the fin de siècle. But underneath his successful career as an artist and poster designer lay a passionate Slav nationalist whose most important and long neglected works are still being painstakingly restored and exhibited in the Czech republic. This book is the first comprehensive overview of his life and work and is published in association with the Mucha Museum in Prague.

With this captivating book, a psychoanalyst provides the first psychological examination of the emotional sources of the never-ending longing for yet another collectible. Includes sketches of diverse collectors such as Walter Benjamin, Mario Praz, Catherine the Great, Petrarch, Brunelleschi, and Jean de Berry.

Thoughtful, amusing, and provocative, Making an Exit will transform the way you look at life's last passage. Because, as Murray discovers, death is, for many, not an ending but the start of something new.

Author and journalist Sarah Murray never gave much thought to what might ultimately happen to her remains—that was, until her father died. While he’d always insisted that the “organic matter” left after a person takes their last breath had no significance, he surprised his family by setting down elaborate arrangements for the scattering of his own ashes. This unexpected last request prompted Murray to embark on a series of voyages to discover how our end is commemorated around the globe—and how we approach our own mortality.

Spanning continents and centuries, Making an Exit is Murray’s exploration of the extraordinary creativity unleashed when we seek to dignify the dead. Along the way, she encounters a cremation in Bali in which two royal personages are placed in giant decorative bulls and consigned to the afterlife in a burst of flames; a chandelier in the Czech Republic made entirely from human bones; a weeping ceremony in Iran; and a Philippine village where the casketed dead are left hanging in caves. She even goes to Ghana to commission her own fantasy coffin.

The accounts of these journeys are fascinating, poignant, and funny. But this is also a very personal quest: on her travels, Murray is seeking inspiration for her own eventual send-off.

From 1933 to 1945, Hitler's Nazi regime attempted to realize its vision of a biologically healthy and ethnically homogeneous population through "racial hygiene" programs designed to cleanse German society of those perceived to threaten its biological health. Deadly Medicine examines the critical role German physicians, scientists, public health officials, and academic experts played in supporting and implementing the Nazis' program of racial eugenics, which culminated in the Holocaust.

Illustrated with many never-before-published photographs, images from rare Nazi publications, and historical artifacts, Deadly Medicine presents essays by internationally recognized authorities that provide the wider contextual framework for a compelling visual and documentary exploration of the origins of the Holocaust. This publication is an accompaniment to the exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum running from April 22, 2004, through October 16, 2005.

The Gothic Reader brings together texts and images from the origins of Gothic art and writing up to the 20th century. It is the first publication to present the Gothic through both the visual arts and literature, helping to establish a new framework for its analysis and appreciation. Writers represented include Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Horace Walpole; artists include William Blake, Henry Fuseli, and J.M.W. Turner. The anthology encompasses novels, essays and criticism, letters and memoirs, and pieces from contemporary newspapers and magazines, in an engaging, stimulating book for the general reader.