700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The book is about secession in America. There is a growing interest in secession, or what some refer to as a national divorce between Red and Blue America. There is...
Fashioning Faces begins with the assumption that cultural history as an approach and a methodology can capture a cultural phenomenon such as the Romantic fascination with biography and portraiture more...
My first book was a sweeping history of jazz music in Japan. I also edited a collection, entitled Jazz Planet, that attempts to “globalize” jazz historiography.So Primitive Selves is a...
In more than thirty years of teaching politics, I have observed that students’ natural healthy cynicism is constantly criticized by the press and by their teachers. I want to assure...
No question, the best way to dip into Before Fiction is by skipping the short Preface and getting right to the Introduction. That’s where I lay out and illustrate my...
The main argument of Secular Devotion, I suppose, will appear to some people as outrageous. I am saying that popular music in the Americas is popular in part because it...
I began my career as an undergraduate student unsure of what to do but with a desire to make the world a better place. After studying Spanish and social work and still not feeling satisfied with an ability to make big macro change, an advisor nudged
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 the argument I make is fairly simple—even intuitive: like other media, cinema domesticated the alleged wilderness of remote places and populations into entertaining representations—executing it required familiarity with a...
Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....
It is early May 2009, only a few days before the impending school inspection by the provincial delegate. The Dong village of Longxing has been selected as one of the...
My last book was a history of the early decades of the NAACP, from its founding in 1909 up through the 1950s. Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making...
Entropy is a concept that's almost as important as energy, but far less widely understood. The book explains how until the 1850s the two concepts were confused, and that a clear understanding of what entropy really is was reached only in 1947...
For me, the most fascinating parts of this story took place outside the stores: in a stadium of college students cheering for capitalism, a theme park about free enterprise with...
Page 55 contains some of the most interesting visual evidence that my book offers, with both methodological and historical significance. On this page, readers will find the “Distinctive Jewish Names,”...
In 2000, I was part of a small team of philosophers and Buddhist adepts invited to spend a few days in Dharamsala, India talking with the 14th</sup> Dalai Lama about...
Morality’s Muddy Waters, as the subtitle suggests, worries about ethical quandaries in recent American history. I like my history and morality muddy, so to speak. Rather than a dry philosophical...
As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...
I find that non-mathematicians often perceive mathematics as a self-contained, inaccessible, body of knowledge that was essentially completed sometime in the distant past. Mathematics is seen as being isolated from...
My book invites readers to contemplate the larger significance of easily overlooked mass produced things. If they were to skim the book, they would encounter dozens of photos and illustrations...
I argue that a single-minded concentration on positive leadership alone is one-sided, skewed, and unable to address the psychology of high-level leaders and extremely complex organizational systems. A failure in...
Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression.But is that right?In The Will...
Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials....
The fields of design and urban history are dominated by public housing enmity. Public housing projects are key proofs, for instance, in the theory that design determines social behavior. When...
I hope that readers will begin with my introduction, which lays out the basic terms of my argument. However, casual readers might prefer to start with one of the chapters...
My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...
Based on the real-life experiences of its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, the HBO series “The Wire,” is regarded by some as among the greatest cultural documents of our...
The search for the origins of the barricade and attempts to identify the key moments in its evolution led me to some surprising conclusions.For example, it has long been accepted...
Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than...
The part of the research for The Food Axis that I found most intriguing and unfamiliar came from women’s records of homesteading on the frontier.When households traveled from settled parts...
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