archive

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

A Brave Vessel - A close-up

If a reader were to ask where to sample a page or two of A Brave Vessel, I would suggest turning to the beginning of chapter five. At that point...

Hobson Woodward

Newlyweds on Tour - The wide angle

At the root of this project lay my interest in honeymoon suites. But the more I read about the general origins of honeymooning in North America, the less it made...

Barbara Penner

How We Became Sensorimotor - The wide angle

Given the philosophical training I received, I was rather frustrated that the recent philosophy of the embodied, extended, embedded, and enactive mind, collectively known in some philosophical circles as 4E,...

Mark Paterson

The Disunited States - The wide angle

I have written several books and articles on the dynamics of secession historically and globally. In an earlier book, Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations...

Ryan D. Griffiths

Yellow Future - The wide angle

I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...

Jane Chi Hyun Park

Desperate Remedies - A close-up

SterilizationWhat occurred then was a crisis for a new profession that had emerged as these new institutions arrived on the scene. It’s something of a chicken and egg phenomenon. The...

Andrew Scull

The Once and Future New York - The wide angle

We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...

Randall Mason

Newlyweds on Tour - In a nutshell

Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon from 1820 to 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple...

Barbara Penner

On the Judgment of History - In a nutshell

We hear a lot these days about the judgment of history. In the face of political conflict, corruption, and sheer lies, we sometimes comfort ourselves by saying that “history” will...

Joan Wallach Scott

Thinking in Place - In a nutshell

Thinking in Place is a collection of nine essays written over the last five years of moving around the world.Each essay is located in a place but sometimes the places...

Carol Becker

Barbarians to Angels - A close-up

A browsing reader might find the chapters on craft production and trade most revealing. The archaeology shows us that even small communities during the so-called Dark Ages belonged to complex...

Peter S. Wells

Chicago 1890 - A close-up

One of the most revered buildings in Chicago’s architectural history is also one of the strangest. Looming over the intersection of Dearborn and Jackson Streets, Burnham’s and Root’s Monadnock building,...

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

Making Monsters - A close-up

If you, the reader, were thumbing through Making Monsters in a bookstore, I hope that you would first glance at the preface, which begins with the testimony of a man...

David Livingstone Smith

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

American Property - The wide angle

Property is both a technical legal subject and an important part of everyday life. So I have tried to write an account that does justice to both without losing either...

Stuart Banner

Living on Campus - In a nutshell

Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people live in residence...

Carla Yanni

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - In a nutshell

This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...

Dana Polan

A Brave Vessel - In a nutshell

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

Hobson Woodward

Fears of a Setting Sun - In a nutshell

Fears of a Setting Sun tells the story of how most of the American founders came to feel deep anxiety, disappointment, and even despair about the government and the nation...

Dennis C. Rasmussen

All the Missing Souls - In a nutshell

Leadership impunity for the commission of atrocity crimes is on the losing side of history now.To understand why the highest political and military leaders are increasingly at risk of indictment...

David Scheffer

The Politics and Ethics of Identity - A close-up

The opening chapter provides an historical, philosophical and psychological overview of the project and its central ideas. The first few pages are especially important in this regard.

Richard Ned Lebow

Blood Royal - A close-up

A “just browsing” feminist could turn to the chapter on female sovereigns to find out about how some countries, at some times, were ruled by women. I counted 27 examples....

Robert Bartlett

The Beautiful Generation - In a nutshell

There was a time when the boutiques that are now so familiar in New York’s landscape were just small tenement buildings, with boarded up windows and bricked up facades.When I...

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

Loving Animals - A close-up

I expect the most controversial aspect of this book may be my acceptance of local, pastured, small farm meat.Part of the reason animal advocacy is so marginalized in American culture...

Kathy Rudy

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy - The wide angle

I am not the first to suggest the end of nature. Close to two decades ago, Bill McKibben announced that climate change spells the empirical end of nature, and more...

Jonathan Walker

The Rise of the Right to Know - A close-up

I think the most interesting and surprising chapter in the book is the one on the role of public disclosure in environmental legislation. What is detailed, especially on pp. 205-219,...

Michael Schudson

Violence Taking Place - In a nutshell

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...

Andrew Herscher

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century - In a nutshell

This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No,...

Thomas N. Bisson

A Vast Machine - The wide angle

I went to graduate school in the 1980s, at the height of the Carter-Reagan Cold War. It was a very scary time, and not only because the risk of nuclear...

Paul N. Edwards

Art and the City - In a nutshell

My book argues that in twentieth century Los Angeles, a city famous for promoting movies and celebrities and a leisurely lifestyle, public art with its ambiguous meanings and controversial forms...

Sarah Schrank

2073 Micro Interviews