"Black Skin, White Masks offers a radical analysis of the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized. Fanon witnessed the effects of colonization first hand both in his birthplace, Martinique, and again later in life when he worked as a psychiatrist in another French colony, Algeria.

Born in 1858, Franz Boas permanently changed the standards and practices of anthropology. His 1940 work Race, Language and Culture brings together a half-century's worth of ground-breaking scholarship in one volume.

Turner's much-anthologized 1893 essay argues that the vast western frontier shaped the modern American character-and the course of US history. Interacting with both the wilderness and Native Americans, settlers on the frontier developed institutions and character traits quite distinct from Europe.

Sigmund Freud, "the father of psychoanalysis," was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1856. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna before opening a private practice in his hometown. His work with physician Josef Breuer on treating nervous disorders led to a book, Studies on Hysteria.

Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) analyzes the ways in which excessive government planning can erode democracy. The work draws influential parallels between the totalitarianism of both left and right, questioning the central government control exerted by Western democracies.

Written in 1887, when Nietzsche was at the height of his powers as a philosopher and writer, On the Genealogy of Morality criticizes the idea that there is just one acceptable moral code.

Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous 17th century, a period in the grip of what historians term the General Crisis (2013).

Four social groups brought down the French monarchy. Why? Because in 1789 each of these very different groups had compelling reasons to defy royal authority.