For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband's encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary ...

In 1790, America was in enormous debt, having depleted what little money and supplies the country had during its victorious fight for independence. Before the nation's greatest asset, the land west of the Ohio River, could be sold it ...

Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consi...