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Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft
Professor Brooks Landon
Investigate the myriad ways we think about, talk about, and write sentences. In Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft, Professor Brooks Landon from the University of Iowa—one of the nation's top writing schools—shows you the pleasure in reading and writing great sentences. Explore the stylistic rewards (and risks) of various sentence forms, learn how to build and appreciate effective and elegant sentences, get unique insights into the nature of great writing—and discover how you can achieve some of this greatness yourself.
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Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time
Professor Sean Carroll
Time rules our lives. From the rising and setting of the sun to the cycles of nature, the thought processes in our brains, and the biorhythms in our day, nothing so pervades our existence and yet is so difficult to explain. Time seems to be woven into the very fabric of the universe. But why? In 24 riveting half-hour lectures, Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time shows how a feature of the world that we all experience connects us to the instant of the formation of the universe—and possibly to a multiverse that is unimaginably larger and more varied than the known cosmos.
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Save Up To $185
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Apocalypse: Controversies and Meaning in Western History
Professor Craig R. Koester
What are we to make of the book of Revelation? The Apocalypse: Controversies and Meaning in Western History, by scholar and Professor Craig R. Koester, is your guide to this extraordinary work and its impact on our civilization. These 24 thought-provoking and enlightening lectures are divided into three parts: the historical and intellectual background of the Apocalypse; a close reading of the book of Revelation, focusing on the meaning of its captivating and haunting images; and the wide-ranging legacy of its content on both Christian and Western history.
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Save Up To $185
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Origins of the Human Mind
Professor Stephen P. Hinshaw
Get an authoritative guide to the latest information and viewpoints on what neurobiologists, psychologists, and other scientists know about our minds in Origins of the Human Mind. These 24 intriguing and enlightening lectures lay bare the inner workings of our minds. And they're all brought to you by award-winning Professor Stephen P. Hinshaw, whose thorough and unbiased approach to this fascinating subject reveals how the science of the human mind applies to the life of our species—and to your own life as well.
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Save Up To $185
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Buddhism
Professor Malcolm David Eckel
In its 2,500-year history, Buddhism has expanded from a tiny religious community in northern India into a movement that now spans the globe. Buddhism is your opportunity to trace the history, principles, and evolution of a theology that is both familiar and foreign. In 24 revealing lectures, you survey the faith from its origins in the 6th century B.C.E. to its present status as a major world religion. Award-winning Professor Malcolm David Eckel of Boston University introduces you to the astonishing vitality and adaptability of a tradition that has transformed Eastern civilizations and has now become a lively component in the cultures of the West.
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Save Up To $185
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Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe
Professor Sean Carroll
Everything we can see with our eyes and with powerful instruments—everything we think of as atom-based matter—is only 5 percent of what we know exists. The rest of the contents of the cosmos is invisible to our current methods of detection—but something out there is holding galaxies and galaxy clusters together, and something else is causing space itself to fly apart. These invisible components are dark matter and dark energy, the most eagerly studied subjects in astronomy and particle physics today.
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Save Up To $185
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Pompeii: Daily Life in an Ancient Roman City
Professor Steven L. Tuck
In the 24 enthralling lectures of Pompeii: Daily Life in an Ancient Roman City, eminent classicist and Professor Steven L. Tuck resurrects the long-lost lives of aristocrats, merchants, slaves, and other individuals from this imperial Roman city—made famous for its demise after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The result is an unprecedented view of life as it was lived in this ancient culture and an opportunity to discover intriguing details that lay buried for centuries.
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Save Up To $430
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Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Rise of Nations
Professor Andrew C. Fix
Explore four centuries of radical transformation as a decimated Europe rose from the ashes of the plague to embrace the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. In this course, you will explore the political, social, cultural, and economic revolutions that transformed Europe between the arrival of the Black Death in the 14th century and the onset of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.
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Unexpected Economics
Professor Timothy Taylor
Grasp as never before the ways in which economics operates in areas you may never have considered. Delivered by acclaimed economist and Professor Timothy Taylor, the 24 lectures of Unexpected Economics offer a wide-ranging investigation of how economic thinking—whether applied personally, nationally, or globally—relates to, and sheds fresh light on, just about everything. Using findings from recent Nobel Prize winners and leading-edge fields like behavioral economics, Professor Taylor explores the economics behind subjects such as discrimination, natural disasters, charity, and even terrorism.
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Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, 2nd Edition
Professor Robert Sapolsky
When are we responsible for our own actions, and when are we in the grip of biological forces beyond our control? This intriguing question is the scientific province of behavioral biology, a field that explores interactions among the brain, mind, body, and environment that have a surprising influence on how we behave and interact.
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Historical Jesus
Professor Bart D. Ehrman
Worshiped around the globe by more than a billion people today, Jesus is undoubtedly the single most important figure in the story of Western civilization and one of the most significant in world history altogether. Yet, Jesus of Nazareth presents unique challenges to the historian, as Professor Bart D. Ehrman explains in this 24-lecture course on the search for the Jesus of history. Join him for an erudite survey of sources, methods, contexts, and problems, and then weigh his carefully thought-out historical interpretation of the words and deeds of the man from Galilee.
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Save Up To $185
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Dante’s Divine Comedy
Various Professors
Two gifted teachers share the fruit of two lifetimes’ worth of historical and literary expertise in this rewarding introduction to one of the greatest poems ever written. You will explore invaluable background information on Dante’s life, why he wrote the Divine Comedy, how to approach English editions, and many of the poem’s characters and episodes.
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Philosophy of Mind: Brains, Consciousness, and Thinking Machines
Professor Patrick Grim
The quest to understand the mind has motivated some of history's most profound thinkers. Only in our own time are we beginning to see the true complexity of this quest. In the scientific search for the mind, the role of philosophers is to sharpen our concepts, untangle the morass of questions, and systematically explore alternate approaches. These 24 half-hour lectures will make you think, evaluate your own opinions, and change your mind not a few times as you grapple with the endlessly interesting phenomena of mind.
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Save Up To $430
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Origins and Ideologies of the American Revolution
Professor Peter C. Mancall
In Professor Peter C. Mancall's 48 lectures you learn how our emerging nation astonished the world leaders of the day, broke away from its mother country, and fashioned a republic capable of sustaining itself generation after generation.
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Save Up To $185
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St. Augustine’s Confessions
Various Professors
This course examines all 13 books, or chapters, of this masterpiece that inspired Dante and Martin Luther and encouraged Christianity to accept the thinking of Plato. It provides the background needed to understand the Confessions as Augustine intended and analyzes his account—told in stories that are as powerful as any in world literature—of the events leading to his Christian conversion.
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