700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
I guess there are different ways to read this book. I designed it to make people see Silicon Valley in 3D. Like the cover does: it shows Silicon Valley in...
This book is a study of the English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the plague epidemic of the summer of 1636, which killed almost half the population. It is also about...
From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...
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,...
“Conservative” means different things in different times and places. This book describes and explains the different types of conservatism in American history, from the Constitution to the end of the...
If the linguistic revolution inaugurated by Noam Chomsky in his seminal 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures teaches anything, it is the role that rules play in our understanding of how the...
Justice Rising places Robert Kennedy squarely at the center of the movement for racial justice in the 1960s. In reconsidering Kennedy’s public life, the book offers a fresh account of...
The title is an almost absurdly clear description of the book, but the truth is, until my editor suggested that title to me, I wasn’t quite sure that what I...
If science made you an atheist, you are ready for serious scientific answers to the rest of life’s persistent questions.Here is a list of most of these questions and their...
One of the main goals of this book is to narrow the divide that exists between the study of religion in the late ancient Mediterranean and the study of Islamic...
The proliferation of biological weapons—BW for short—to states or terrorists is one of the most pressing security issues of the twenty-first century. At a time when the United States enjoys...
This book is about the first skyscrapers in the world, those built in Chicago in the 1880s and 90s. The unprecedented sixteen-story buildings lining La Salle and Dearborn Streets gave...
Copycats and Contrarians takes on the idea, promulgated by some economists, that humans are selfish and independently-minded creatures, who use complex mathematical rules to solve problems. This book argues that...
I have lived in, observed, and written about Chicago for approximately 30 years.My academic home is the Political Science Department at DePaul University. I earned my Ph.D. in Urban Planning...
Throughout Western history, philosophers have suggested that what is human is determined by what we eat. Whether they think that we are what we eat (like Rousseau and Herder) or...
Chapter 13 is entitled “Injury and Recovery: How Much Banging until the Batback Goes Bonk?” When thinking of Batman, people tend to often think of his gear and technology, often...
In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...
Vietnam and China first demarcated a border in 1079, when the two sides agreed that “the Quan Nguyen and Guihua prefectures were two sides of a ‘fixed border’ (qiangjie) region...
The black-and-white photograph shows a group of professional women posing in front of a brand-new dormitory. The year is 1928. It is a cold day. The women are bundled in...
I have a longstanding interest in old maps. My last book, Mapping the Nation, traced a sea change in the way that Americans and Europeans thought about and used maps...
Heroes of Empire tells the story of five colonial figures, two British and three French, who made imperial conquest exciting, even exhilarating, for millions of ordinary citizens.Most British and French...
I first became interested in the phenomenon of conscience through my work in corporate law.Some readers may find this odd: the business world is often described as a place where...
One of my favorite sections in the book is about how the Reagan administration disciplined the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in the 1980s.The IDB was founded in 1959 to provide...
Manufacturing once drove the U.S. economy. Its factories and innovations defined American capitalism in the twentieth century. At its height in the 1950s, American-based manufacturing represented 25.8% of GDP and...
Chapter One, “Modernism in Europe and America,” outlines the book’s major arguments. It also focuses on the urban aspects of modernism, the cultural importance of cities like Vienna, Berlin, Paris,...
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...
I have tried to make this investigation extremely wide. The rarity of documented female rulers in large, well-organized states makes it necessary to find them wherever one can, and as...
Toward the end of the second chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. For me, this section embodies all the concepts I try to engage in the book.I...
Given the conceptual similarity between obscene depictions and hate speech, it would seem likely that some guidance could be drawn from the analysis of obscenity that would help us more...
It was not my intention to diverge so sharply from the accepted interpretation of the Thirty Years War. My brief was to write an accessible account, updated to incorporate insights...
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