In this overview of the Baltic region from the Vikings to the European Union, Michael North presents the sea and the lands that surround it as a Nordic Mediterranean, a maritime zone of shared influence, with its own distinct patterns of trade, cultural exchange, and conflict. Covering over a thousand years in a part of the world where seas have been much more connective than land, The Baltic: A History transforms the way we think about a body of water too often ignored in studies of the world’s major waterways.

The Baltic lands have been populated since prehistory by diverse linguistic groups: Balts, Slavs, Germans, and Finns. North traces how the various tribes, peoples, and states of the region have lived in peace and at war, as both global powers and pawns of foreign regimes, and as exceptionally creative interpreters of cultural movements from Christianity to Romanticism and Modernism. He examines the golden age of the Vikings, the Hanseatic League, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and Peter the Great, and looks at the hard choices people had to make in the twentieth century as fascists, communists, and liberal democrats played out their ambitions on the region’s doorstep.

With its vigorous trade in furs, fish, timber, amber, and grain and its strategic position as a thruway for oil and natural gas, the Baltic has been—and remains—one of the great economic and cultural crossroads of the world.

By the year 2000, half of humanity will live in urban areas. The problems of large-scale urbanization are profound, and coping with growth in the world's cities will be the most pressing challenge of the 21st century.In June 1996, the third in a series of United Nations sponsored conferences on global concerns was held: the Conference on Human Settlements, Habitat II. In preparation for that meeting, Robert Geddes, one of the nation's most respected and influential architects and urban designers, invited leading experts to New York to consider the experience of urban areas in Canada, Mexico, and the United States in order to develop concrete proposals for improving our built environment. Cities in Our Future presents and examines issues set forth at that gathering.Urban and regional planners, architects, urban designers, and other experts from across North America examine the impact of a city's growth and form on the ability of its citizens to achieve and maintain social equity and environmental health. Case studies of five North American metropolitan areas -- New York, Toronto, Cascadia (Vancouver, Seattle, Portland), Mexico City, and Los Angeles -- are presented, with in-depth analyses of their physical terrain, design, planning, and development. Contributors discuss problems the cities have experienced, how those problems have been handled, and strategies for avoiding or managing similar problems in the future. They consider historical and contemporary transformations of the cities as well as issues of environment, equity, sustainable development, governance, and civic design.In addition to the case studies, Cities in Our Future features a foreword by Dr. Wally N'Dow, secretary-general of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements-Habitat II, that describes the global nature of urbanization problems; an insightful introduction by urban critic Ellen Posner that provides an overview of important issues facing urban areas in the twenty-first century; a broad examination of the concept of social equity by political philosopher Alan Ryan of Oxford University; and a concise description of environmental health issues by John Spengler of the Harvard School of Public Health. The distinguished contributors representing the five urban regions are Alan Artibise, Jonathan Barnett, Gardner Church, Ken Greenberg, Marilou McPhedran, Ann Vernez Moudon, Xavier Cortes Rocha, Ethan Seltzer, Richard Weinstein, and Robert Yaro.

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome’s fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this “dead language” is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern languages.

Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city’s imperial might grew. By the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro fixed Latin’s status as a “classical” language with a codified rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin origins following the empire’s collapse—shedding cases and genders along the way—the ancient language retained its currency as a world language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it ceased to evolve.

Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a once peerless empire.

The Vatican’s dealings with the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich have long been swathed in myth and speculation. After almost seventy years, the crucial records for the years leading up to 1939 were finally opened to the public, revealing the bitter conflicts that raged behind the walls of the Holy See. Anti-Semites and philo-Semites, adroit diplomats and dogmatic fundamentalists, influential bishops and powerful cardinals argued passionately over the best way to contend with the intellectual and political currents of the modern age: liberalism, communism, fascism, and National Socialism. Hubert Wolf explains why a philo-Semitic association was dissolved even as anti-Semitism was condemned, how the Vatican concluded a concordat with the Third Reich in 1933, why Hitler’s Mein Kampf was never proscribed by the Church, and what factors surrounded the Pope’s silence on the persecution of the Jews.

In rich detail, Wolf presents astonishing findings from the recently opened Vatican archives—discoveries that clarify the relations between National Socialism and the Vatican. He illuminates the thinking of the popes, cardinals, and bishops who saw themselves in a historic struggle against evil. Never have the inner workings of the Vatican—its most important decisions and actions—been portrayed so fully and vividly.

In April 1993, a national conference sponsored by the Center for Plant Conservation brought together academic biologists, agency staff members, activists, and other experts to critically explore the value of ecological restoration as a conservation strategy. Restoring Diversity examines and expands on issues set forth at that gathering. Topics covered include: the strategic and legal context for rare plant restoration the biology of restoration use (and misuse) of mitigation in rare plant conservation case studies from across the United States Restoring Diversity is a pathbreaking work that not only unifies concepts in the field of restoration, but also fills significant technical and policy gaps, and provides operational tools for successful restorations.