Rorotoko

In a nutshell

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500 million people dates back only to 2004.

My book is about a “Europe” fundamentally different from its previous incarnations, reconstructed from the rubble of World War II with America’s generous assistance. It is the story of how post-World…

In a nutshell

Hot Stuff is a cultural history of disco that is at once scholarly and popular. The book charts disco’s trajectory—from its steamy beginnings in Manhattan’s gay clubs through its Blob-like takeover of pop music, to its apparent collapse—probing throughout what made disco so compelling to some and so troubling to others. Rock once had its enemies, too, but they were reliably conservative. By contrast, disco managed to offend…

In a nutshell

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical background to the distinctions between science and engineering and considers their relevance for solving today’s global problems.

I emphasize that science, in its purest form, working alone, is not likely to solve problems relating to climate and energy…

In a nutshell

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American cinema’s representation of the country’s distinct geographic and racial diversity. Thus the book touches upon formal conventions about national and racial difference that preceded the inception of moving pictures and even of photography, conventions which both producers and…

In a nutshell

From Utopia to Apocalypse is a study of political upheaval and revolutionary change, as they are portrayed in works of speculative and science fiction. It is my contention that science fiction and speculative narratives, by virtue of their fantastic character, enable us to imagine in vivid terms the experience of sweeping political change and social transformation. The narratives I discuss in this book—the superhero comics of Alan Moore,…

In a nutshell

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over the past forty or so years.

Today’s all-volunteer military was born in crisis. It grew out of turmoil over the Vietnam War, and its first decade is a chronicle of struggle and frustration. In the wake of a…

In a nutshell

This is a literary biography of Helen of Troy. It is not a historical life of a Bronze Age princess or a study of mythology; it is not an account of Troy or an exploration of the ancient world. It does not consider whether Helen of Troy had a historical existence or was a mythical figure. My subject is the literary afterlife of the woman we know as…

In a nutshell

An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910.

Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place during Twain’s final years and how those experiences affected him, both personally and professionally. Writers have speculated on whether his final decade was ruled by a growing misanthropy or whether he retained his keen sense of humor…

In a nutshell

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences.

Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it raised practical and theoretical questions about the individual and challenged the regime’s transformational aspirations. To them it represented unbridled individualism and a remnant of bourgeois life whose continued presence threatened the revolutionary project. To contain and eventually…

In a nutshell

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in a breadline. We remember the Depression like this in part because of the New Deal cultural projects that turned poor people (especially rural whites) into celebrities of a sort, symbols of the crisis that bourgeois consumers of magazines,…

In a nutshell

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have experienced and ultimately designed their cities.

Taking photographs, viewing movies, listening to radio, using a computer, doing a Google search on a mobile phone, these are all methods of seeing the world by collecting artifacts of the world.…

In a nutshell

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident aliens, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested and tried in Massachusetts for the robbery and murder of a factory paymaster and his security guard in an industrial suburb of Boston, and which turned within a few years…

In a nutshell

The monumental core of Washington, D.C. is a great axis of public space, almost two miles long, stretching from the Grant Memorial below the U.S. Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial overlooking the Potomac River. With the mammoth obelisk of the Washington Monument in the center, anchoring its formal geometry, the National Mall looks like it has been there forever. It has become almost a work of nature:…