This book will catapult and heighten your hope and belief in yourself, your future as well as in your relationship with God. You will see that it is possible to release the pain of the past replacing it with love. The light of truth will shine brighter through your relationships giving you a richer and more fulfilling life.

First secretary to the Aragonese kings of Naples, Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503) was a key figure of the Italian Renaissance. A poet and a philosopher of high repute, Pontano's works offer a reflection on the achievements of fifteenth-century humanism and address major themes of early modern moral and political thought. Taking his defining inspiration from Aristotle, Pontano wrote on topics such as prudence, fortune, magnificence, and the art of pleasant conversation, rewriting Aristotle's Ethics in the guise of a new Latin philosophy, inscribed with the patterns of Renaissance culture. This book shows how Pontano's rewriting of Aristotelian ethics affected not only his philosophical views, but also his political life and his place in the humanist movement. Drawing on Pontano's treatises, dialogues, letters, poems and political writings, Matthias Roick presents us with the first comprehensive study of Pontano's moral and political thought, offering novel insights into the workings of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the early modern period.

On January 20, 1984, Earl WashingtonÑdefended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty caseÑwas found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett's investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

Vivian Gilbert Zabel and Holly Jahangiri offer a collection of 21 original short stories spanning a variety of themes and genre, many crime or mystery based.

Following their invasion of Java on March 1, 1942, the Japanese began a process of Japanization of the archipelago, banning every remnant of Dutch rule. Over the next three years, more than 100,000 Dutch citizens were shipped to Japanese internment camps and more than four million romushas, forced Indonesian laborers, were enlisted in the Japanese war effort. The Japanese occupation stimulated the development of Indonesian independence movements. Headed by Sukarno, a longtime admirer of Japan, nationalist forces declared their independence on August 17, 1945. For Dutch citizens, Dutch-Indonesians or "Indos," and pro-Dutch Indonesians, Sukarno's declaration marked the beginning of a new wave of terror. These powerful and often poignant stories from survivors of the Japanese occupation and subsequent turmoil surrounding Indonesian independence provide one with a vivid portrait of the hardships faced during the period.

In 2020, the Vatican opened its archives for the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), the pope that led the Catholic Church during WWII, the Holocaust, and the beginning of the Cold War. The Global Pontificate of Pius XII brings together historians who were among the first to consult the previously unseen Vatican materials. These long-awaited records allow for an expansion of the current historiography beyond the pope’s biography. Methodologically, the volume works to transcend the rigidity of religious history and engage with new approaches in global, transnational, and postcolonial history to re-introduce questions surrounding religion into modern post-war historiography.

Six myths lie at the heart of the American experience. Taken as aspirational, four of those myths remind us of our noblest ideals, challenging us to realize our nation's promise while galvanizing the sense of hope and unity we need to reach our goals. Misused, these myths allow for illusions of innocence that fly in the face of white supremacy, the primal American myth that stands at the heart of all the others.