A new play from the Platform initiative, which comprises big-cast plays with predominantly female casts, written specifically for youth performers.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explores history’s most daring and transformational intellectual movement, the European and American Enlightenment. In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World. They transformed thought, overturned governments, and inspired visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to life the revolutionary leaders who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, created the modern world. Burns traces the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment to men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same principles have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab world, in the former Soviet Union, and in China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead, and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns’s exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions. Praise for Fire and Light “With this profound and magnificent book, Burns takes us into the fire’s center. . . . Essential for deciphering the challenges of the world we will live in tomorrow.” —Michael Beschloss, New York Times–bestselling author of Presidential Courage “James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America—for better and for worse—what it is.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of Revolutionary Summer “[A] captivating tale. . . . Briskly and beautifully told. . . . Superb.” —Publishers Weekly

This collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales features the original stories by which many popular books, movies, and plays were inspired. With stories such as Snow White, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, and many more, Grimms' Fairy Tales were among the first collections of stories and have since become some of the most influential of our time. Unlike the Hollywood adaptations of some of these most treasured stories, the collected stories of the Grimms brothers are just that – grim. You won’t find gentle happily-ever-after’s--each tale is delightfully twisted and sprinkled with some sort of wickedness on every page. In this edition you’ll come to explore the world of grouchy old women and devilishly tricky creatures as you make your way through the ever enthralling stories that make up the Grimms' Fairy Tales.