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Trent, the Catholic Church's attempt to put its house in order after the Reformation, has long been praised and blamed for things it never did. This one-volume history, the first in modern times, explores the volatile issues that pushed several Holy Roman emperors, kings and queens of France, five popes, and all of Europe to the brink of disaster.

Nineteenth-century Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their villages in Bengal. Demand for "e;Oriental goods"e; took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey's boardwalks into the segregated South. Bald's history reveals cross-racial affinities below the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Humanism has mostly considered the question "e;What does it mean to be human?"e; from a Western perspective. Dabashi asks it anew from a non-European perspective, in a groundbreaking study of 1,400 years of Persian literary humanism. He presents the unfolding of this vast tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.

While First Amendment doctrine treats religion as a human good, the state must not take sides on theological questions. Koppelman explains the logic of this uniquely American form of neutrality: why it is fair to give religion special treatment, why old (but not new) religious ceremonies are permitted, and why laws must have a secular purpose.

Lincoln's Hundred Days tells the story of the period between September 22, 1862, when Lincoln issued his preliminary Proclamation, and January 1, 1863, when he signed the significantly altered decree. As battlefield deaths mounted and debate raged, Lincoln hesitated, calculated, prayed, and reckoned with the anxieties and expectations of millions.

Manski argues that public policy is based on untrustworthy analysis. Failing to account for uncertainty in an uncertain world, policy analysis routinely misleads policy makers with expressions of certitude. Manski critiques the status quo and offers an innovation to improve both how policy research is conducted and how it is used by policy makers.

A pioneer of LGBTQ studies dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. The genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised stereotypes-aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers-and in the social meaning of style.

Consigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings-or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors' perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.

In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.

Coenen Snyder considers what the architecture and construction of nineteenth-century European synagogues reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. The process of claiming a Jewish space was a marker of acculturation but not full acceptance, she argues. The new edifices, even if spectacular, revealed the limits of Jewish integration.

Westerners have a strong impression that Islam does not allow religious imagery. Elias corrects this view. Unearthing shades of meaning in Islamic thought throughout history, he argues that Islamic perspectives on representation and perception should be sought in diverse areas such as optics, alchemy, dreaming, vehicle decoration, Sufi metaphysics.

The Marine Corps has always considered itself a branch apart. Since 1775 America's smallest armed service has been suspicious of outsiders and deeply loyal to its traditions. Undying faith in its exceptionalism made the Marines one of the sharpest, swiftest tools of American military power, but developing this brand did not come without costs.

Fleming and McClain defend a civic liberalism that takes seriously not just rights but responsibilities and virtues. Issues taken up include same-sex marriage, reproductive freedom, regulation of civil society and the family, education of children, and clashes between First Amendment freedoms of association and religion and antidiscrimination law.

Just as economists struggle today to justify the free market after the global economic crisis, an earlier generation revisited their worldview after the Great Depression. In this intellectual history of that project, Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider the most basic assumptions of a market-centered world.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and made sense of one another. Richly illustrated, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere.

Lockhart's Mathematician's Lament outlined how we introduce math to students in the wrong way. Measurement explains how math should be done. With plain English and pictures, he makes complex ideas about shape and motion intuitive and graspable, and offers a solution to math phobia by introducing us to math as an artful way of thinking and living.

Addressing a host of hot-button issues, Horwitz argues that rigidly doctrinal interpretation renders First Amendment law inept in the face of messy, real-world situations. Courts should let institutions with a stake in these freedoms do more work to enforce them. Self-regulation and public criticism should be the key restraints, not judicial fiat.

When Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.

Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes, yet their behavior is not well understood, even among themselves. Using statistical methods, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making to dispel the mystery of how decisions from district courts to the Supreme Court are made.

In their famous debates, Lincoln and Douglas struggled with how to behave when an ethical conflict like slavery strained democracy's commitment to rule by both consent and principle. What conscience demands and what it can persuade others to agree to are not always the same. Ultimately, this tragic limitation of liberalism led Lincoln to war.

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn New York craftsman whose impoverished life was electrified by the Mormon faith. Turner provides a fully realized portrait of this spiritual prophet, viewed by followers as a protector and by opponents as a heretic. His pioneering faith made a deep imprint on tens of thousands of lives in the American Mountain West.

Soldier of Christ reveals a paradoxical figure: a prophetic reformer of limited vision whose leadership stimulated the emergence of a global Catholicism while sowing doubt and dissension among some of the Church's most faithful servants. The Cold War and Pius XII's manner of engaging with the modern world defined his pontificate, Ventresca argues.

A mere forty miles apart, these cities have enjoyed a scratchy rivalry since wistful Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and defiant Glasgow came into its industrial promise. Crawford brings them to life between the covers of one book, in a tale that mixes novelty and familiarity, as Scotland's cultural capital and largest commercial city do.

What India's founders derived from Western political traditions is widely understood. Less well-known is how India's own rich knowledge traditions of 2,500 years influenced these men. Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, showing how five founders turned to classical texts to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood.

Since the time of the Vikings, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend on it for survival, and people have shaped the Atlantic. In his account of this interdependency, Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.

Provine boldly goes where other scientists seldom tread-in search of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and other lowly, undignified, human behaviors. Our earthiest instinctive acts bear the imprint of our evolutionary origins and can be valuable tools for understanding how the human brain works and what makes us different from other species.

Too young to vote or pay taxes, teenagers are off the radar of political scientists. Yet civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in experiences as members of families, schools, and community organizations. Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage civic engagement, and how their political identities take form.

Until the nineteenth century, "e;risk"e; was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.

Women's physiology evolved to aid reproduction, not to reduce disease. Any trait-however detrimental to post-reproductive health-is preserved in the next generation if it increases the chances of having offspring who will survive and reproduce. For this reason, the author argues, many common diseases are especially difficult for women to prevent.

Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize awarded annually by Harvard University Press for an outstanding book on education and societyWhat makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. The short answer is-it's not what teachers do, it's what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out-but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.