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Corrupt Circles - In a nutshell

Corruption has existed since the earliest civilizations but documenting and writing its history has not been easy. In the case of Peru, tackling through detailed research the challenges to writing...

Alfonso W. Quiroz

Dreaming the English Renaissance - The wide angle

In the early 1990s, when I was completing the research for a book about Elizabeth I, I came across a document. It was a dream a woman named Joan Notte...

Carole Levin

Unhomed - A close-up

The most surprising chapter in the book is probably Chapter 3, “Adrift: The Freedom of the Female Hitchhiker.” It deals with the brief but intense cycle of exploitation films about...

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Trading Locomotives - The wide angle

Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...

Naofumi Nakamura

Buying Power - The wide angle

Long distance solidarity is perhaps the key concept I explore in this book. Consumer activists were among the first Americans to declare that moral agency should not be dictated by...

Lawrence B. Glickman

Inventing Iron Man - In a nutshell

Inventing Iron Man is a kind of sequel to my earlier book Becoming Batman. That book was about asking how far can our biology take us toward the performance of...

E. Paul Zehr

The Insurgent Barricade - The wide angle

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

Mark Traugott

The Future of Change - The wide angle

The book builds on the work of scholars who have noted that social movements changed their shape and focus in the 1970s to become more top-down and professionalized. In the...

Ray Brescia

The Interethnic Imagination - In a nutshell

The Interethnic Imagination raises to view an important shift in the contemporary literature Americans have been reading. It claims that since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the...

Caroline Rody

Winston Churchill - A close-up

I have to say the first pages in the book should be read first because I deliberately wrote them in order to draw the reader in. They tell of an...

Richard Toye

Field Notes from Elsewhere - A close-up

Field Notes lends itself to browsing, starting and stopping here and there. One of the interesting things about early responses to the book is that people’s interests and concerns draw...

Mark C. Taylor

Plastic Capitalism - In a nutshell

Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where at other times in history, we’ve...

Amanda Boeztkes

The Death of the American Trial - A close-up

The second chapter of the book provides a broad historical account of the importance of the Anglo-American trial and the fierceness with which the Founding Fathers defended it. The story...

Robert P. Burns

The Theory That Changed Everything - A close-up

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his...

Philip Lieberman

Fearless Women - A close-up

When browsing for a book, I enjoy employing Ford Madox Ford’s “page 99” test. An English literary critic and novelist, Ford wrote in the 1920s, “Open the book to page...

Elizabeth Cobbs

The Mental Life of Modernism - In a nutshell

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not big ones. That’s why the sea change the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music underwent at the turn of the 20th...

Samuel Jay Keyser

Bad for Democracy - The wide angle

As I finished my last book, National Manhood, a historical look at how notions of middle-class manhood and citizenship developed in the early United States, two movies about fictional presidents...

Dana Nelson

The Genius Checklist - In a nutshell

The Genius Checklist addresses the most essential questions about identifying, developing, and manifesting creative genius. Some of these questions have been examined by thinkers for centuries. These recurrent issues include:...

Dean Keith Simonton

Everything but the Coffee - The wide angle

Starbucks is not really all that special or unique. Despite its claims of good deeds and better works, the company, at the end of the day, is typical—typical of how...

Bryant Simon

Six-Legged Soldiers - In a nutshell

Six-Legged Soldiers is a story, a bizarre and fantastic tale of how humans have conscripted the natural world—insects in particular—to do our bidding in times of war.For thousands of years...

Jeffrey A. Lockwood

The Singing Turk - A close-up

If you opened the book to page 162 you would see a portrait print of Ludwig Fischer, the basso in Vienna for whom Mozart composed the great Turkish role of...

Larry Wolff

Tyrants on Twitter - A close-up

How do you propose to regulate social media?The key part of the proposal is to ban Chinese and Russian state agents from US social media platforms. In order to do...

David L. Sloss

The Lolita Effect - The wide angle

There has been a great deal of public discussion lately about the sexualization of girlhood, from the provocative Bratz dolls for toddlers (described by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker...

M. Gigi Durham

Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men - The wide angle

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

David S. Powers

Exceptional People - In a nutshell

Discussions about migration in the media and elsewhere are limited by a lack of perspective of international migration’s historical role, contemporary impacts, and future prospects. Exceptional People addresses these gaps....

Ian Goldin

High Crimes and Misdemeanors - In a nutshell

Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...

Frank O. Bowman III

The Quest for the Cure - A close-up

In 1957, during a cleanup of his lab at the pharmaceutical company Roche, Leo Sternbach discovered an old flask containing a chemical he had synthesized previously, but discarded for lack...

Brent R. Stockwell

Radical Romanticism - A close-up

So, you’re at the bookstore. You come upon Radical Romanticism and, flipping through its opening pages, you read a passage on a dream in Wordsworth’s Prelude. A man awakens in a desert, is handed a shell shaped like a book, and hears within it “a loud prophetic...

Mark S. Cladis

The Birthright Lottery - A close-up

By treating the automatic and perpetual transmission of citizenship by birth as a weak moral link, resembling the property regimes of old that are now deeply discredited and banned, The...

Ayelet Shachar

GIANTS - In a nutshell

GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln is a dual biography of the two preeminent self-made men in American history. Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less...

John Stauffer

2073 Micro Interviews