Silverman's new book is a comprehensive overview of Jewish circumcision throughout history. Beginning with Genesis, the author traces paradoxes and tensions in biblical-Jewish circumcision as seen both within Judaism and from the dominant, non-Jewish culture, and ends with the current debate over Jewish and routine medical circumcision in America. This book is essential reading in Jewish studies, medical sociology, and Judaic studies/theology.

"Von Drehle has chosen a critical year ('the most eventful year in American history' and the year Lincoln rose to greatness), done his homework, and written a spirited account."N"Publishers Weekly."

Abraham creates a portrait of a young, crumbling marriage. It is alternately sad and compelling.'

In this beautifully designed volume, America's top Lincoln historians offer a diverse array of perspectives on the life and legacy of America's sixteenth president. Spanning Lincoln's life -- from his early career as a Springfield lawyer, to his presidential reign during one of America's most troubled historical periods, to his assassination in 1865 -- these essays, developed from original C-SPAN interviews, provide a compelling, composite portrait of Lincoln, one that offers up new stories and fresh insights on a defining leader. Extras include a timeline of Lincoln's life, brief biographies of the 56 contributors, and Lincoln's most famous speeches.

Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.

This biography for young readers examines the life of the sixteenth U.S. president and the constitutional issues that arose during his administration. Praise by many as America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln guided the country through the Civil War and was the Great Emancipator who freed the enslaved and paved the way for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Lincoln was denounced by others as a tyrant who trampled the Constitution, denied individual liberty, and failed to avert the war that left more than six hundred thousand American soldiers dead. Born in a cabin deep in the backwoods of Kentucky, growing up in a family considered “the poorest of the poor,” Lincoln rose to become a highly respected lawyer and stateman. He often used different arguments with different people depending on the needs of the moment, leading one exasperated opponent to call him two-faced, and leaving others to marvel at his effectiveness as a politician and leader. A practical statesman and not an idealist, Abraham Lincoln knew he could not accomplish all he set out to do, but he remained alert for opportunities to achieve his long-desired objective of liberty and justice for all. The book includes selections of Lincoln’s writing, a bibliography, and an index. “This concise and balanced narrative encapsulates the life and legacy of one of the country’s most important leaders. . . . A solid addition for understanding America’s story.” —Kirkus Reviews “The author adroitly reviews the facts of Lincoln's entire life, divided into 16 chapters, and examines his emergence as a politician and his views on slavery.” —School Library Journal

In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier." The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England. In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire. Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials, Abraham in Arms reconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.