As Christmas celebrations for 2015 wind down, Stanford historian and archaeologist Ian Morris discusses the global reach of different aspects of the Christmas holiday, and compares theories of the relative influence of "soft power" cultural exports and "hard power" military and economic intervention on world societies.

This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the eighteenth century that is closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at English securities traded in both London and Amsterdam. Private information reached Amsterdam through sailing boats that sailed only twice a week and in adverse weather could not sail at all. Results are consistent with a Kyle model in which informed agents trade strategically. Most importantly, the speed of information revelation in Amsterdam depended on the expected time until the private signal would become public.

"Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction" is chapter 27 of the The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine and published by Oxford University Press.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies considers, via a variety of methodologies and combinations of interdisciplinary approaches, how the architecture that enables human cognitive processing interacts with cultural and historical contexts. Organized into five parts (Narrative, History, Imagination; Emotions and Empathy; The New Unconscious; Empirical and Qualitative Studies of Literature; and Cognitive Theory and Literary Experience), the volume uses case studies from a wide range of historical periods (from the fourth century BCE to the twenty-first century) and national literary traditions (including South Asian, postcolonial anglophone and francophone, Chinese, Japanese, English, Iranian, Russian, Italian, French, German, and Spanish).

After an American hostage was mistakenly killed in a CIA drone strike, Stanford historian Priya Satia argues that oversight of and attitudes toward the drone program should be examined in light of continuing civilian deaths in the AfPak region in the April 30, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post.

As Peter Longerich's definitive biography of Joseph Goebbels is published in English translation, Stanford emeritus professor James J. Sheehan provides an overview of Goebbels' contributions to the Third Reich and reviews Longerich's efforts, including those involved in the heroic undertaking of evaluating Goebbels 32 volumes-worth of diary in the May 13, 2015 edition of The New York Times.

"The Distribution of Power: Hierarchy and its Discontents" is chapter 18 of the book The Cambridge World History (Volume 3), edited by Norman Yoffee and published by the Cambridge University Press.

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume of The Cambridge World History explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas.

"Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius" is chapter 9 of the book Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker, edited by Maria di Salvo, Daniel H. Kaiser, and Valerie A. Kivelson and published by Academic Studies Press.

Word and Image invokes and honors the scholarly contributions of Gary Marker. Twenty scholars from Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Ukraine and the United States examine some of the main themes of Marker’s scholarship on Russia—literacy, education, and printing; gender and politics; the importance of visual sources for historical study; and the intersections of religious and political discourse in Imperial Russia. A biography of Marker, a survey of his scholarship, and a list of his publications complete the volume.

"Greek Cities in the First Millenium BCE" is chapter 16 of the book The Cambridge World History (Volume 3), edited by Norman Yoffee and published by the Cambridge University Press.

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume of The Cambridge World History explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centres for defence and warfare. They show how in these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new rituals and ceremonies connected leaders with citizens and the gods, new identities as citizens were created, and new forms of power and sovereignty emerged. They also examine how this unprecedented concentration of people led to disease, violence, slavery and subjugations of unprecedented kinds and scales.