Rorotoko

In a nutshell

Animal Characters studies the place of nonhuman animals in Renaissance writing.

Between 1400 and 1700, written and visual records tell us, Europeans began to experience the animal world in new ways. Animal Characters uses these records to describe the changing fortunes of five breeds of animal—horses, parrots, cats, turkeys, and sheep—as they lived, died, and were written about in the early modern period.

My book follows the fate…

In a nutshell

Great Books, Bad Arguments looks at three of the most famous texts in Western political thought and asks whether the proposals advanced by Plato, Hobbes, and Marx for the avoidance of disorder and injustice in human societies are sufficiently plausible, when analyzed sociologically, to carry conviction.

The conclusion I draw is that they are not. And that the problem which they accordingly pose is that of accounting for…

In a nutshell

The modern history of the Jews is deeply intertwined with the history of capitalism. My book tries, in a brief compass, to show the many facets of this relationship.

The way in which capitalism itself was interpreted by modern Western thinkers and political movements was often influenced by the linkage between Jews and commerce—a linkage going back to the medieval Christian stigmatization of usury and the Jews’ role…

In a nutshell

Wounded Knee is the story of the 1890 massacre in South Dakota that left more than 250 Sioux and 25 soldiers dead.

The book explains the history of the relationship between the Sioux and the American government, the religious movement among the Sioux that made Indian agents nervous, the escalating tensions between the military and the Indians, and, finally, the massacre and its aftermath.

Critically, though, Wounded Knee…