“A crisp, dramatic examination of how technology and human ingenuity are undermining North Korea’s secretive dictatorship.”—Kirkus Reviews One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government’s sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea’s information underground—the network of citizens who take extraordinary risks by circulating illicit content such as foreign films, television shows, soap operas, books, and encyclopedias. By fostering an awareness of life outside North Korea and enhancing cultural knowledge, the materials these citizens disseminate are affecting the social and political consciousness of a people, as well as their everyday lives. “A fine primer on the country, based on extensive interviews with defectors.”—Times Literary Supplement “A fascinating book.”—The New York Times “[A] timely and cogent book.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “A fascinating and intelligent overview of the ways that information is liberating North Koreans’ minds.”—Robert S. Boynton, author of The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project “A fascinating, important, and vivid account of how unofficial information is increasingly seeping into the North and chipping away at the regime’s myths—and hence its control of North Korean society.”—Sue Mi Terry, former CIA analyst and senior research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University

Building upon past insights, Dr. Rivkin moves forward in recognizing the unique contributions and reconstructing the obscure origins of the Pharisees. Through analysis of the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, the New Testament, and the body of writings known as the Tannaitic literature, he arrives at a valid identity for the Pharisees: a scholar class dedicated to the supremacy of the twofold Law, the Written and the Oral, who opposed the Sadducees (exponents of the sole authority of the Written Law) and who ultimately made the twofold Law operative in Jewish society. Dr. Rivkin asserts that the essence of the Pharisaic "hidden revolution" was a firm and unwavering belief in a triadic doctrine that elevated the individual above the cultic system and made salvation an individual rather than a group matter. In this way, the Pharisees paved the way for Christianity and Islam.

Mexico's Hidden Revolution is the first book to examine the relationship between the Catholic church and the government in Mexico from 1929 until the present. Following the Mexican Revolution, religion was constitutionally banned from the political sphere, church property was seized, and clerical attire was outlawed in public. Yet, as this fascinating study demonstrates, behind the scenes the church and government had a tacit understanding that has led to cooperation rather than conflict. Reich's empirical and theoretical analysis in Mexico's Hidden Revolution will interest scholars and students in the fields of Latin American history, legal history, political science, and religious studies. In addition, all readers interested in the current constitutional debates in Mexico over the appropriate role for Catholicism in public life will find Mexico's Hidden Revolution an important and timely book.

A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. His theory was truly radical: during his lifetime nearly everyone believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. One of the transcendent geniuses of the early Renaissance, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. A cleric who lived during the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, he kept at least one mistress. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work among other scholars. It fact, he kept his astronomical work a secret, revealing it to only a few intimates, and the manuscript containing his revolutionary theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things." It is unlikely that Copernicus' masterwork would ever have been published if not for a young mathematics professor named Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus' ideas, and with his imagination on fire he journeyed hundreds of miles to a land where, as a Lutheran, he was forbidden to travel. Rheticus' meeting with Copernicus in a small cathedral town in northern Poland proved to be one of the most important encounters in history. Copernicus' Secretrecreates the life and world of the scientific genius whose work revolutionized astronomy and altered our understanding of our place in the world. It tells the surprising, little-known story behind the dawn of the scientific age.

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries saw a period of technological, historical, and even social advancements. Men like James Hargreaves and Eli Whitney worked to make life easier for the working class, inventing machines like the spinning jenny and the cotton gin. But men weren’t the only luminaries of the Industrial Revolution: women of all ages from the joined in the revolution to further advance society. Margaret Elizabeth Knight brought paper bags to the world, and Elizabeth Magie’s interest in politics and economics gave us the much beloved game of Monopoly. And what would we do without Tabitha Babbitt’s circular saw or Josephine Cochran’s dishwasher? In today’s modern world, we often take important inventions like these for granted, but with their female inventors, we’d be living vastly different lives. A part of the Hidden in History series, “The Untold Stories of Women During the Industrial Revolution” shares the stories of women who should be remembered for their remarkable talents, ingenious inventions, and hard work, but have been previously overshadowed and forgotten to history.