Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory

This is a fond look at J. B. Rhine and his colleagues and protégés in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, which, no longer affiliated with Duke University, lives on as the Rhine Research Center Institute for Parapsychology. Rhine and the lab were dedicated to scientific study and quantification of ESP and related phenomena. They got results such that, in the 1930s, the head of Duke’s psychology department declared Rhine’s work to be “the first hard evidence that the elusive proof of life after death might be out there.” 

Watch on the Rhine

Watch on the Rhine is an excellent book for both veterans of the Posleen series as well as new readers. Far more graphic and dark than Ringo's four original books, and far more battle-intensive than Julie Cochrane's "Cally's War," Watch on the Rhine covers the German response to the evil alien invasion of the Posleen.

A husband preserved in mothballs, a vigilante victim encased in red mud, and convicts beaten and burned in a prison riot are only a few of the cases of death examined here by forensic anthropologist Stanley Rhine. Drawing on cases he worked for the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, Rhine demonstrates how unidentified skeletal remains indicate race, sex, age, height, and ultimately identity and how the specialist decodes skeletal anomalies to establish cause of death. Blunt trauma, gunshot and knife wounds, and other injuries receive his attention.
Step by step the author explains the techniques used to solve forensic mysteries. At the end of each case, he explains what lessons the forensic anthropologist learns from the bones. Rhine also explores specific problems and tasks: working mass disasters; recovering bodies from the field; defleshing bones; examining charred and badly decomposed remains; testifying before juries; and others.

Matthew Innes
State And Society In The Early Middle Ages
The middle Rhine valley was a region whose geopolitical profile underwent a series of dramatic changes between the late Roman period and the high middle ages, changes which affected the relationship of the region to the political centre. In this Roman frontier province political power was transformed by the Imperial infrastructure, which led to the foundation of fortified settlements as the central points of local society, an influx of men and resources in the army, and, in the fourth century, the physical proximity of the Emperor. Eventually, in the fifth century, the middle Rhine found itself cut off from the redistributive system of the Roman army and administration. A new power structure, which expressed itself in the idiom of a ‘frontier culture’ which had developed through the interaction of barbarian elites and the Roman military, had emerged by the sixth century. The change from Roman to post-Roman, the atrophy of institutionalised forms of power and the emergence of militarised rule which tapped the agrarian surplus directly, was far more abrupt here than elsewhere in Gaul. By 600, rulers began once again to be involved in the region directly; rulers based, as they had been in the fourth century, in northern Gaul, but increasingly interested in exploitation of the ‘wild east’, the provinces beyond the Rhine, and happy to stay at Worms and Mainz. In the second half of the eighth century, the final consolidation of Frankish royal power in the east placed the Rhine at the heart of Empire, a development consummated by the construction of magnificent palace complexes at Ingelheim and Frankfurt. The symbolic significance of these centres, and the geopolitical centrality of the region, meant that the middle Rhine remained a royal heartland to the end of the early medieval period and beyond.