The DeAutremont brothers were looking for a big score. They brought dynamite, guns and a getaway car. On October 11, 1923, at the summit of the Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon, the three young men held up a passenger train, with disastrous consequences. Their rash actions resulted in the tragic deaths of three Southern Pacific trainmen and one U.S. Mail clerk, unleashing a public outcry that still rings through Oregon's history. In this riveting account, rail historian Scott Mangold draws on interviews, in-depth research and previously unpublished maps and photographs to document the events at Tunnel 13. Join Mangold as he chronicles the resulting four-year manhunt and eventual conviction of the DeAutremonts and provides insight into the lives derailed by the robbery's bitter legacy.

If there's any place in Chicago that's been all things to all men, it has to be the corner of the city that is occupied by Edgewater and Uptown. Babe Ruth and Mahatma Gandhi found a place of refuge at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, but the locale has also been a sanctuary for Appalachian coal miners and Japanese Americans released from internment camps. Al Capone reportedly moved booze through a secret tunnel connecting the Green Mill and the Aragon Ballroom, "Burglar Cops" moonlit out of the Summerdale police station and a "Kitchen Revolt" by some not-very-ordinary housewives sent once-invulnerable machine ward boss Marty Tuchow on his way to Club Fed. Ferret out the hidden history of Uptown and Edgewater with veteran beat reporter Patrick Butler in this curio shop of forgotten people and places.

Route 66 is no longer the main thoroughfare between Chicago and St. Louis, but if local lore is to be believed, ghostly traffic along the Mother Road continues unabated. Janice Tremeear chases down accounts of a man executed for witchcraft, the demon baby of Hull House and the secrets of H.H. Holmes's "Murder Castle." Native American legends place the piasa bird in the skies above the highway's southern stretch with the same insistence that characterize contemporary UFO sightings in the north. In between, spirits such as Resurrection Mary join the throng of hapless souls wandering the roadside of the Prairie State's most famous byway.

Alabama is no stranger to the battles and blood of the Civil War, and nearly every eligible person in the state participated in some fashion. Some of those citizen soldiers may linger still on hallowed ground throughout the state. War-torn locations such as Fort Blakely National Park, Crooked Creek, Bridgeport and Old State Bank have chilling stories of hauntings never before published. In Cahawba, Colonel C.C. Pegue's ghost has been heard holding conversations near his fireplace. At Fort Gaines, sentries have been seen walking their posts, securing the grounds years after their deaths. Sixteen different ghosts have been known to take up residence in a historic house in Athens. Join author Dale Langella as she recounts the mysterious history of Alabama's most famous battlefields and the specters that still call those grounds home.

Many Americans are familiar with Thomas Edison's "invention factory" in Menlo Park, where he patented the phonograph, the light bulb and more than one thousand other items. Yet many other ideas have grown in the Garden State, too--New Jerseyans brought sound and music to movies and built the very first drive-in theater. In addition to the first cultivated blueberry, tasty treats like ice cream cones and M&Ms are also Jersey natives. Iconic aspects of American life, like the batting cage, catcher's mask and even professional baseball itself, started in New Jersey. Life would be a lot harder without the vacuum cleaner, plastic and Band-Aids, and many important advances in medicine and surgery were also developed here. Join author Linda Barth as she explores groundbreaking, useful, fun and even silly inventions and their New Jersey roots.

Long before the era of the foodie, the little coal-mining town of Krebs set the standard for celebrating food in Oklahoma. Its reputation as the Sooner State's Little Italy began in the mid-1870s when Italian immigrants chased the coal boom to Pittsburg County, deep in the heart of the Choctaw Nation. After 150 years, Italians and Choctaw neighbors are now bound by pasta, homemade cheeses and sausages and native beer once brewed illegally in basement bathtubs and delivered by children from door to door. Stop by for a steak at GiaComo's, a Choc at Pete's Place, lamb fries at the Isle of Capri, gnocchi at Roseanna's or a gourd of caciocavallo at Lovera's--venues that have proven impervious to time and hardship. Join Food Dude Dave Cathey on a tour through this colorful and delicious history.

"That summer afternoon, I had no way of knowing the book would radically alter my existence. Yet that proved to be the case."

So writes folklorist José Manuel de Prada-Samper about a chance discovery more than thirty years ago of an obscure book called Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a second-hand bookshop in England.

Part historical detective story, part memoir, Fading Footprints traces the author’s journey into the magical folklore of the /xam hunter-gatherers of the Upper Karoo. Through archival research and on field trips in South Africa, De Prada-Samper is able to humanise the /xam as he delves into the work and lives of researchers William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who recorded the stories of San prisoners in Cape Town in the late 1800.

The author learns that many are still told to this day by farm workers in forgotten corners of the Northern Cape and that, contrary to common belief, the culture and traditions of South Africa’s first people are still alive.

As "animal factories" go, the Ohio Penitentiary was one of the worst. For 150 years, it housed some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States, including murderers, madmen and mobsters. Peer in on America's first vampire, accused of sucking his victims' blood five years before Bram Stoker's fictional villain was even born; peek into the cage of the original Prison Demon; and witness the daring escape of John Hunt Morgan's band of Confederate prisoners. Uncover the full extent of mayhem and madness locked away in one of history's most notorious maximum-security prisons.

The discipline of religious studies has, historically, tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes that occur in the context of individual performances outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies, and scholars have largely dismissed the fact that there are extensive discussions of ritual mistakes in many indigenous traditions' religious literature. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time, and they continue to carry ritual "weight," even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong, Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems, developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far. Using a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq, and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies, McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong, and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid, supple, and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and, in some cases, shaping them.

University Park is one of Los Angeles's most diverse and historic neighborhoods. Beginning with the founding of the University of Southern California in 1880, the area has hosted two Olympic Games and numerous presidents and been featured as a backdrop for dozens of movies, along with countless other events of cultural and historical significance. Few areas in Southern California boast such a wide variety of historic buildings--residential, educational and commercial--dating to LA's earliest days. With USC as its anchor, University Park thrives as a microcosm of LA's culture, architecture and development from an outpost accumulating settlers into one of the world's great cosmopolitan metropolises. Join author Charles Epting on this historical inventory of University Park's significant moments and lasting legacy.

The Oregon State Insane Asylum was opened in Salem on October 23, 1883, and is one of the oldest continuously operated mental hospitals on the West Coast. In 1913, the name was changed to the Oregon State Hospital (OSH). The history of OSH parallels the development and growth in psychiatric knowledge throughout the United States. Oregon was active in the field of electroshock treatments, lobotomies, and eugenics. At one point, in 1959, there were more than 3,600 patients living on the campus. The Oscar-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed inside the hospital in 1972. In 2008, the entire campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the state began a $360-million restoration project to bring the hospital to modern standards. The story of OSH is one of intrigue, scandal, recovery, and hope.

In this book, Yaroslav Komarovski argues that the Tibetan Buddhist interpretations of the realization of ultimate reality both contribute to and challenge contemporary interpretations of unmediated mystical experience. The model used by the majority of Tibetan Buddhist thinkers states that the realization of ultimate reality, while unmediated during its actual occurrence, is necessarily filtered and mediated by the conditioning contemplative processes leading to it, and Komarovski argues that therefore, in order to understand this mystical experience, one must focus on these processes, rather than on the experience itself. Komarovski also provides an in-depth comparison of seminal Tibetan Geluk thinker Tsongkhapa and his major Sakya critic Gorampa's accounts of the realization of ultimate reality, demonstrating that the differences between these two interpretations lie primarily in their conflicting descriptions of the compatible conditioning processes that lead to this realization. Komarovski maintains that Tsongkhapa and Gorampa's views are virtually irreconcilable, but demonstrates that the differing processes outlined by these two thinkers are equally effective in terms of actually attaining the realization of ultimate reality. Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Experience speaks to the plurality of mystical experience, perhaps even suggesting that the diversity of mystical experience is one of its primary features.

A down-to-earth book which explains the essential Anglican approach to worship, the scriptures, spirituality, doctrine, rityeaosial and moral questions, dialogue with people of other faiths and much more.

Until recently, Spinoza's standing in Anglophone studies of philosophy has been relatively low and has only seemed to confirm Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's assessment of him as "a dead dog." However, an exuberant outburst of excellent scholarship on Spinoza has of late come to dominate work on early modern philosophy. This resurgence is due in no small part to the recent revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy and to the increased appreciation of Spinoza's role as an unorthodox, pivotal figure - indeed, perhaps the pivotal figure - in the development of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza's penetrating articulation of his extreme rationalism makes him a demanding philosopher who offers deep and prescient challenges to all subsequent, inevitably less radical approaches to philosophy. While the twenty-six essays in this volume - by many of the world's leading Spinoza specialists - grapple directly with Spinoza's most important arguments, these essays also seek to identify and explain Spinoza's debts to previous philosophy, his influence on later philosophers, and his significance for contemporary philosophy and for us.

In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a combination of libertarianism-the view that humans sometimes act freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of nondeterministic processes-and agency reductionism-the view that the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a dominant theory that has similar aims, put forth by well-known philosopher Robert Kane. Many philosophers contend that event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable kind of freedom and responsibility. To Franklin, this position is mistaken. Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains: toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self and its role in the genesis of action. Crucially, if this problem proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism.

1994 symbolised the triumphal defeat of almost three and a half centuries of racial separation since the Dutch East India Company planted a bitter almond hedge to keep indigenous people out of `their' Cape outpost in 1659. But for the majority of people in the world's most unequal society, the taste of bitter almonds linger as their exclusion from a dignified life remain the rule.

In the year of South Africa's troubled coming-of-age, veteran investigative journalist Michael Schmidt brings to bear 21 years of his scribbled field notes to weave a tapestry of the view from below: here in the demi-monde of our transition from autocracy to democracy, in the half-light glow of the rusted rainbow, you will meet neo-Nazis and the newly dispossessed, Boers and Bushmen, black illegal coal miners and a bank robber, witches and wastrels, love children and land claimants.

With their feet in the mud, the Born Free youth have their eyes on the stars.

In the United States roughly 2 million people are incarcerated; billions of animals are held captive (and then killed) in the food industry every year; hundreds of thousands of animals are kept in laboratories; thousands are in zoos and aquaria; millions of "pets" are captive in our homes. Surprisingly, despite the rich ethical questions it raises, very little philosophical attention has been paid to questions raised by captivity.
Though conditions of captivity vary widely for humans and for other animals, there are common ethical themes that imprisonment raises, including the value of liberty, the nature of autonomy, the meaning of dignity, and the impact of routine confinement on physical and psychological well-being. This volume brings together scholars, scientists, and sanctuary workers to address in fifteen new essays the ethical issues captivity raises. Section One contains chapters written by those with expert knowledge about particular conditions of captivity and includes discussion of how captivity is experienced by dogs, whales and dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees, rabbits, formerly farmed animals, and human prisoners. Section Two contains chapters by philosophers and social theorists that reflect on the social, political, and ethical issues raised by captivity, including discussions about confinement, domestication, captive breeding for conservation, the work of moral repair, dignity and an ethics of sight, and the role that coercion plays.