Terror

Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by David P. Womersley. New York: Penguin, 1999. Primary source dealing with "terror" as an incarnation of what is sublime in nature.

Carter, Rita. Mapping the Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998. Cogent, popular study of how the brain works, with sections on the amygdala or "fear center."

Cohn, Norman Rufus Colin. The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Secker and Warburg, 1957. An authoritative look at the "panic cults" and apocalyptic terrors of the Middle Ages and early modern periods.

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. New York: Macmillan, 1968. A gripping account of Stalin's purges.

Fumagalli, Vito. Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages. Translated by Shayne Mitchell. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1994. Enlightening psychogeography of the medieval world.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Treatise on realpolitik in the sixteenth century.

Newman, Paul. A History of Terror. Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 2001. Accessible survey of the various manifestations of terror and panic against a historical backdrop.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts of the Middle Ages. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1998. Shows how "ghosts" were harnessed to the chariot of religion.