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The World in Play - A close-up

Oscar Wilde—the subject of my concluding chapter—is the true hero of the book. Were a reader to read only one chapter, it should probably be my chapter on Wilde, for...

Matthew Kaiser

Leonard Bernstein - The wide angle

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...

Barry Seldes

The World in a City - The wide angle

With regard to the larger picture, my book chronicles moral and legal conflicts, political intrigue, retribution, and drastic consequences—all of which were unintended.There is a dark evil here, smoldering under...

David M. Struthers

Great Books, Bad Arguments - In a nutshell

Great Books, Bad Arguments looks at three of the most famous texts in Western political thought and asks whether the proposals advanced by Plato, Hobbes, and Marx for the avoidance...

W. G. (Garry) Runciman

The Speed Handbook - The wide angle

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new...

Enda Duffy

Money Games - In a nutshell

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

David M. Carter

The Idealist - The wide angle

These broad questions of authenticity and displacement challenge the political, cultural, and economic habits of city dwellers all over the world. But Naked City is also a very specific book...

Samuel Zipp

Vanishing America - A close-up

Perhaps the greatest challenge I faced in writing this book was presenting a balanced depiction of the celebrated conservationist and nature writer Aldo Leopold. Few people have thought more deeply...

Miles A. Powell

Everything but the Coffee - In a nutshell

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...

Bryant Simon

The Interethnic Imagination - The wide angle

I was trained as an ethnic Americanist and wrote my first book on African American and Caribbean women’s fictions about history—mostly novels about slavery. You might think of that project...

Caroline Rody

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West - A close-up

The book ended up longer than I anticipated—in part because the evidence that I accumulated in Cairo, London, and Washington, proved to be so rich and the story so compelling...

Martyn Frampton

Madness in Civilization - The wide angle

I have worked on the history of psychiatry for four decades now. I originally wrote on the rise of the asylum in Victorian Britain, and the emergence of the modern...

Andrew Scull

East Asia Before the West - The wide angle

In 1592, the Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea with over 160,000 troops on approximately 700 ships. Intending to conquer China after first subduing Korea, he eventually mobilized half a...

David C. Kang

Making Sense of Pakistan - A close-up

Many of the key questions posed in my book are encapsulated in the third chapter, “The Burden of Islam.”The chapter offers a bird’s eye view, a panorama of how politics...

Farzana Shaikh

Fractured Rebellion - A close-up

The red guards’ violence against their victims was shocking, and this is how they are rightly remembered. It turns out, however, that they were not all mindlessly violent. In fact,...

Andrew G. Walder

The Civil War of 1812 - The wide angle

The point of departure for the book is a severe illness I suffered in December 2005. As a result of a biopsy, I went into septic shock and suddenly fell...

Alan Taylor

The Disunited States - A close-up

There are two sections that I hope browsers would encounter. The first is from a section at the beginning called the Year of Two Presidents. It is a fictional vignette...

Ryan D. Griffiths

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

Bad Girls Go Everywhere - In a nutshell

Bad Girls Go Everywhere, in addition to exploring the life experiences of a legendary magazine editor, makes a claim for Helen Gurley Brown’s inclusion in the pantheon of second wave...

Jennifer Scanlon

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty - In a nutshell

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,...

Wendy Brown

The Cult of the Constitution - A close-up

I would hope that the reader would encounter the first pages of the preface first. They do not outline an argument or a political position but tell a personal story...

Mary Anne Franks

Program Earth - The wide angle

One of the key objectives in Program Earth is to rework theories of sensing by decentering the human subject that is meant to be the key locus through which sensation...

Jennifer Gabrys

Free Speech Beyond Words - The wide angle

The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was...

Mark V. Tushnet

Cuba in Revolution - The wide angle

In Cuba in Revolution I have gone away from the common tendency to present the Revolution’s trajectory as a series of often unrelated â€˜phases’, a confusing zigzag experience of contradictory...

Antoni Kapcia

The Arab Winter - In a nutshell

Today many people think that, in retrospect, the Arab spring was doomed to fail. Arab popular self-government was a “mirage,” a “false dawn.” There was no truly transformative political self-determination...

Noah Feldman

Inventing the Enemy - The wide angle

Inventing the Enemy grew out of my previous book, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, which described the impact of the terror on the unions, workers, and industry....

Wendy Z. Goldman

Camps - In a nutshell

Camps are unavoidable functions of our contemporary moment, registering local and global forces at their earliest stages and thus signaling trend, crisis, and identity. These malleable spaces conform to our...

Charlie Hailey

Trucking Country - A close-up

One of the reasons Trucking Country appeals to general interest readers outside of the academy is my attention to the cultural history of trucking, particularly the Hollywood movies and Nashville...

Shane Hamilton

Unlikely Collaboration - A close-up

The intense, warm, almost passionate friendship of Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ can be seen in a couple of exchanges during the 1930s. This is a letter Stein wrote to...

Barbara Will

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity - In a nutshell

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...

Erich S. Gruen

2073 Micro Interviews