700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators600+ Threads
A Book Forged in Hell is about one of the most important and controversial books in Western history, one that continues to be vitally relevant today.Writing in May, 1670, the...
Inventing the Enemy is about the period known as the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. At the height of the terror in 1937–38, the Soviet secret police under the...
Our understanding of world politics in the “modern” world (i.e. the past couple of centuries) has been dominated by the “inside/outside distinction.”On the one hand, “domestic” politics, the inside, involves...
Moderation is not, as some secularist firebrands would have us believe, just a watered down version of more committed beliefs. Rather, it is a way of believing that is different...
Calexico takes the reader to a border unlike the stereotypes.The lawlessness of some border flashpoints dominates border news. The bulk of Americans, those of us living far from the 2,000...
In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to...
If a person were randomly opening the book I think I’d want them to flip to page 177, the beginning of Chapter Six, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the...
For someone who felt passionately about cities from a very young age, my formal education actually took place away from them. Early on I was aware of the ways in...
The business of contemporary art has changed immeasurably over the last half century. What was essentially a small, insider trade clustered in a few key avant-garde capitals has expanded into...
I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...
Battling Pornography chronicles the formation and development of an American feminist anti-pornography movement from 1976 to 1986. The book emphasizes the internal movement dynamics and external structural factors that supported...
How do nations, peoples, and ethnic groups fashion their own collective identities? For antiquity as well as for the modern era, one general answer has prevailed: societies shape their self-consciousness...
In a sense, Eurolegalism is a book about how the EU attempts to govern and what impact it has on its member countries.Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly...
The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was an internationally celebrated event, and was also the occasion for numerous proclamations, across the political spectrum, of a dawning unbordered world. Yet,...
Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began...
Zoot Suit is a history of one of the most famous “street styles” of the 20<sup id="">th</sup> century. With its broad shoulders, tapered long jacket, pegged pants, and swinging key...
I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem.I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...
Each chapter deals with similar questions. What were the main forces that shaped business and its role in the economy? What new businesses emerged? How did they operate? What was...
Twilight of the Idols is ultimately a book about the central importance of deviance to the formation of American mass culture during the 1920s.Given our current media obsessions with unusual...
This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace.Could you...
The financial crisis of 2007-2008 triggered a huge demand for history, an unprecedented urge to place the event in a historical perspective.Two questions came up time and time again. How...
The Real Real Thing shows early 21st</sup>-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...
The Invention of Ecocide traces the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam from the origins of plant physiology, in Charles Darwin’s laboratory, to the apex of the global...
The book’s story line carries, I hope, some dramatic interest. And it demands relatively little background knowledge. A reader whose curiosity is piqued will hopefully go further and cover the...
Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done.The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...
Disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine have always taken animals seriously as the subject of research. In the humanities and social sciences, the field sometimes known as “animal studies” began...
Violette Nozière tells the story of a high-profile criminal case that took place in Paris in 1933-34.An eighteen-year-old girl, the only child of a striving lower-middle-class couple, carefully devised and...
The Italian Renaissance has always been understood as the foundation of European art. The entire artistic tradition through Picasso stems from the extraordinary achievements of early 16th century artists.Traditionally, this...
The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists.The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...
Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” is one of the many remarkable works that I write about. An effigy of José Martí, it is an exquisitely painful portrait, depicting the Cuban...
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