Includes stories on the female stranger of Gadsby's Tavern in Alexandria, the mysterious stone showers in Newport, the ghost hound of the Blue Ridge, Mad Lucy of Williamsburg, and the spirits of native sons Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict
The Eve of Spain demonstrates how the telling and retelling of Spain's founding myth played a central role in the formation of that country's national identity. King Roderick, the last Visigoth king of Spain, rapes (or seduces) La Cava, the daughter of his friend and counselor, Count Julian. The count returns to Africa, gathers an army of Moors, ......
Norman Austin has organized his analysis of classical Greek myths around Lacan's dichotomy between (ineffable) Being and the meanings imposed upon Being by culturally determined signifiers. The primary signifiers in myth (the gods), as projections of contradictory meanings, impel human consciousness in contradictory directions: toward heroic ......
Does Leonardo Da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper", contain a hidden code about a precious secret? "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown has stirred the popular imagination by cleverly interweaving such theories and more. This book examines the creative uses of history in Brown's novel, showing that the facts behind the novel are fascinating.
A collection of articles which explores pseudoscience and strange religious beliefs. This book covers a range of topics - including UFOs, rainmaking, ghosts, the Big Bang, ESP, Oral Roberts, as well as the early history of spiritualism and bizarre 'trance channelling' cults.
Best known for his many popular books about science and mathematics, the author demonstrates that his interests encompass nearly everything else as well.
Looks at science as a dogmatic attempt to explain phenomena in prefabricated and often constrictive terms. This title intends to recount hundreds of strange situations that the author felt eluded scientific explanation - from black rain to six-legged lambs - many of which were reported in mainstream scientific publications.
Fear and ignorance have run rampant throughout human history. This book aims to expose the roots of such mental maladies as witchcraft and its persecution, asceticism, and unbridled hedonism, the crusades and millenarianism, nazism's monumental conceit, and the tactics of McCarthyism, as well as the belief in nostrum vendors and bogus messiahs.
