The Grand Experiment

"Darwin's book on evolution admitted that "intermediate links" were "perhaps the most obvious and serious objection to the theory" of evolution. Darwin recognized that the fossils collected by scientists prior to 1859 did not correspond with his theory of evolution, but he predicted that his theory would be confirmed as more and more fossils were found. One hundred and fifty years later, Evolution: The Grand Experiment critically examines the viability of Darwin's theory"--

In 1938, the discovery of a large, unusual fish turned the scientific community on end. Dubbed a "living fossil," the discovery of a coelacanth in South Africa shocked scientists around the world who thought this type of fish had died out millions of years prior during the process of evolution.Today, living fossils are organisms preserved in the fossil record that still exist in similar form today. Their existence challenges the core concepts of evolution and create a fascinating debate among scholars. Do they indicate a younger earth than some have thought, placing the millions-of-years evolutionary timeline into question? Or do living fossils represent a deep mystery?Living Fossils, Vol. 2, Evolution: the Grand Experiment delves into these provocative questions. Includes 700 color images presented in an easy-to-read format. Ideal as a standalone study unit for schools and homeschoolers or easily integrated into existing curricula.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER The capstone book in a trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Lead and The American Story and host of Bloomberg TV’s The David Rubenstein Show—American icons and historians on the ever-evolving American experiment, featuring Ken Burns, Madeleine Albright, Wynton Marsalis, Billie Jean King, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many more. In this lively collection of conversations—the third in a series from David Rubenstein—some of our nations’ greatest minds explore the inspiring story of America as a grand experiment in democracy, culture, innovation, and ideas. -Jill Lepore on the promise of America -Madeleine Albright on the American immigrant -Ken Burns on war -Henry Louis Gates Jr. on reconstruction -Elaine Weiss on suffrage -John Meacham on civil rights -Walter Isaacson on innovation -David McCullough on the Wright Brothers -John Barry on pandemics and public health -Wynton Marsalis on music -Billie Jean King on sports -Rita Moreno on film Exploring the diverse make-up of our country’s DNA through interviews with Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, diplomats, music legends, and sports giants, The American Experiment captures the dynamic arc of a young country reinventing itself in real-time. Through these enlightening conversations, the American spirit comes alive, revealing the setbacks, suffering, invention, ingenuity, and social movements that continue to shape our vision of what America is—and what it can be.

The essays in this volume reflect the exciting new directions in which legal history in the settler colonies of the British Empire has developed. The contributors show how local life and culture in selected settlements influenced, and was influenced by, the ideology of the rule of law that accompanied the British colonial project. Exploring themes of legal translation, local understandings, judicial biography, and "law at the boundaries," they examine the legal cultures of dominions in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to provide a contextual and comparative account of the "incomplete implementation of the British constitution" in these colonies.

An outline, chiefly of political events, relating mainly to the 19th-20th centuries.

This is the first book on a crucial issue in human resource management. In recent years, employers have begun to require, as a condition of employment, that their nonunion employees agree to arbitrate rather than litigate any employment disputes, including claims of discrimination. As the number of employers considering such a requirement soars, so does the fear that compulsory arbitration may eviscerate the statutory rights of employees. Richard A. Bales explains that the advantages of arbitration are clear. Much faster and less expensive than litigation, arbitration provides a forum for the many employees who are shut out of the current litigative system by the cost and by the tremendous backlog of cases. On the other hand, employers could use arbitration abusively. Bales views the current situation as an ongoing experiment. As long as the courts continue to enforce agreements that are fundamentally fair to employees, the experiment will continue. After tracing the history of employment arbitration in the nonunion sector, Bales explains how employment arbitration has actually worked in the securities industry and at Brown & Root, a company with a comprehensive dispute resolution process. He concludes by summarizing the advantages, disadvantages, and policy implications of adopting arbitration as the preeminent method of resolving disputes in the American workforce.

America's lax moral attitudes are placing the nation on the brink of national suicide. No other nation has ever purposely promoted its own self-destruction. At no other time in recorded history has a nation's internalized sense of guilt dominated its social and political thinking; never a collective desire to purge itself of self-fabricated guilt complexes whose origins are, more often than not, imaginary. We have devolved into groveling apologists seeking redemption for being a great nation. The path of least resistance, it seems, lies in undermining the customs and traditions of time-honored institutions that once made many of us proud Americans.

Read Rachel Machacek's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community. One year of dating. One year of looking for love. One uproarious and touching memoir. After years of dating without a connection, Rachel Machacek vowed to try a more dedicated, less slipshod, more scientific way of finding love. So, she committed a year of her life to trying every mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) method of meeting the right guy. In The Science of Single, Rachel welcomes readers into the findings from her roller- coaster year, and although she set out looking for the right chemistry, what she discovers in the process is hilarious, unexpected, and infinitely more exciting. Watch a Video

This dramatic narrative of breathtaking scope and riveting focus puts the "story" back into history. It is the saga of how the most ambitious of big ideas -- that a world made up of many nations can govern itself peacefully -- has played out over the millennia. Humankind's "Great Experiment" goes back to the most ancient of days -- literally to the Garden of Eden -- and into the present, with an eye to the future. Strobe Talbott looks back to the consolidation of tribes into nations -- starting with Israel -- and the absorption of those nations into the empires of Hammurabi, the Pharaohs, Alexander, the Caesars, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, the Ottomans, and the Hapsburgs, through incessant wars of territory and religion, to modern alliances and the global conflagrations of the twentieth century. He traces the breakthroughs and breakdowns of peace along the way: the Pax Romana, the Treaty of Westphalia, the Concert of Europe, the false start of the League of Nations, the creation of the flawed but indispensable United Nations, the effort to build a "new world order" after the cold war, and America's unique role in modern history as "the master builder" of the international system. Offering an insider's view of how the world is governed today, Talbott interweaves through this epic tale personal insights and experiences and takes us with him behind the scenes and into the presence of world leaders as they square off or cut deals with each other. As an acclaimed journalist, he covered the standoff between the superpowers for more than two decades; as a high-level diplomat, he was in the thick of tumultuous events in the 1990s, when the bipolar equilibrium gave way to chaos in the Balkans, the emergence of a new breed of international terrorist, and America's assertiveness during its "unipolar moment" -- which he sees as the latest, but not the last, stage in the Great Experiment. Talbott concludes with a trenchant critique of the worldview and policies of George W. Bush, whose presidency he calls a "consequential aberration" in the history of American foreign policy. Then, looking beyond the morass in Iraq and the battle for the White House, he argues that the United States can regain the trust of the world by leading the effort to avert the perils of climate change and nuclear catastrophe.