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Shoot an Iraqi - A close-up

Here in the U.S. we read and watch the news of countless deaths in Iraq and other war-torn countries around the world. We briefly take note of the incidents, sometimes...

Wafaa Bilal

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name - A close-up

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,”...

Kirsten Fermaglich

Too Much to Know - A close-up

My favorite chapter is the one on note-taking (chapter two). It is about how students and adults in the Renaissance were taught and encouraged to take notes.Humanist pedagogues argued that...

Ann Blair

The Chemical Age - In a nutshell

The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...

Frank A. von Hippel

Tech - The wide angle

My previous research was about the French movie industry. In 2014, Netflix was just arriving in France, opening up an office in Paris. I got funding for studying this company...

Olivier Alexandre

The Stalin Cult - A close-up

Socialist realism was arguably the 20th century’s most successful artistic phenomenon, especially if measured in terms of quantitative output and geographical reach. Yet socialist realism remains notoriously difficult to define....

Jan Plamper

Mystery of the Night Café - In a nutshell

This is my third book on the spiritual journey of the artist Vincent Van Gogh. I began with an overview of his life, Van Gogh and God, then focused on...

Cliff Edwards

Thomas Mann's War - The wide angle

Although Thomas Mann’s War is primarily a book about the 1930s and 1940s, I embarked on the project because of my interest in contemporary literature. This connection came full circle...

Tobias Boes

The First Pop Age - In a nutshell

The First Pop Age takes up these matters above all: how Pop art folds painting and photography into one another; how, in doing so, it combines the effect of immediacy...

Hal Foster

Lenin's Brother - The wide angle

Lenin’s Brother follows my earlier work on Lavrov, Nechaev, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The book allowed me to revisit Lenin’s entry into the revolutionary movement—a fateful moment. Most historians agree...

Philip Pomper

Reading Orientalism - The wide angle

The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how...

Daniel Martin Varisco

Civil Passions - In a nutshell

Civil Passions is about how we deliberate about justice, and specifically about the role the passions play in this process. The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of...

Sharon R. Krause

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought‍ - The wide angle

We tend to think of modernity as a time when religion could be set aside without this having a major effect on public discourse. But this understanding of modernity is...

Meirav Jones

The Culture Transplant - In a nutshell

The Culture Transplant is about the fact that on average, immigrants never fully assimilate. Europeans who violently migrated to North America usually didn’t assimilate to Native American culture and levels...

Garett Jones

The Fall of the Wild - A close-up

Although The Fall of the Wild is text-driven, it contains a number of photographs, some of them quite famous in the visual history of wildlife conservation.Chapter three (“The Call of...

Ben A. Minteer

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition - The wide angle

The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...

Clifford Ando

Manga's First Century - In a nutshell

Manga’s First Century is about the history of manga. It says 1905 to 1989 in the subtitle, but actually it jumps back immediately to the 1860s, when periodicals first emerged in Japan. It is about 125 years, give or take, which is a long time for a modern history. I am making the argument that manga is a modern thing that emerges out of modernity in Japan. Exploring where periodicals started in Japan, and what ...

Andrea Horbinski

The Disunited States - In a nutshell

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...

Ryan D. Griffiths

American Modernism and Depression Documentary - The wide angle

A central argument of my book is that the modernist element within Depression documentary was not merely aesthetic but intimately related to the turbulent politics of the Depression era. Perhaps...

Jeff Allred

The Gnostic New Age - A close-up

The first page starts with my encounter as an 18-year old college student with the Gospel of Thomas and its unconventional Jesus––an encounter that was utterly transforming for me. It...

April D. DeConick

Coyote at the Kitchen Door - The wide angle

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter...

Stephen DeStefano

Memory, Trauma, and History - In a nutshell

Memory, Trauma and History is comprised of essays that fall into five overlapping subject areas: history and memory; psychoanalysis and trauma; postmodernism, scholarship, and cultural politics; photography and representation; and...

Michael S. Roth

The Week - In a nutshell

This is a book about how we experience and imagine time. Although treatments of that subject often focus on the clock, modern time consciousness is organized around calendars as well....

David M. Henkin

Heaven’s Bride - The wide angle

The retrieval of Craddock’s life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major religious, cultural, and political issues of her day—and, often enough, of our own as...

Leigh Eric Schmidt

More - The wide angle

People have wrestled with population and the control of reproduction for thousands of years. Yet both of these topics are always sensitive and hence mostly marginalized in literature and public...

Robert Engelman

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - A close-up

In the hands of your browsing reader, I'd like the book to fall open to a pair of pages displaying two paintings by Julian Lethbridge, Traveling Salesman and Traveling Salesman...

William J. Cook

Hotter Than That - A close-up

A casual reader might want to start with page 106, the beginning of “Bending Brass,” the chapter in which I tell the story of my own experience with the trumpet....

Krin Gabbard

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

One Day in the Life of the English Language - The wide angle

One thing I ask often is this: what is the value of “correct” grammar? It seems to me that correctness has gotten a bad reputation: most people think it’s an...

Frank L. Cioffi

Great Books, Bad Arguments - A close-up

I would hope that potential readers who come across the book in their local or campus bookstore will either, having glanced at the opening pages, be sufficiently intrigued to glance...

W. G. (Garry) Runciman

2073 Micro Interviews