All the threads

Nature has ended, and environmentalism should welcome it, managing wildness rather than fencing it off.

I would want a casual reader to focus on the last chapter, “Being an Environmentalist: Decisive Uncertainty and the Future of American Environmentalism.”Here I explain that, without nature, environmentalism becomes...

Living through the End of Nature

Read the thread →

Nature has ended, and environmentalism should welcome it rather than mourn it.

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...

Living through the End of Nature

Read the thread →

Nature has ended, and environmentalism should welcome it, managing wildness rather than fencing it off.

Nature is hard to find these days. Six and half billion people spread across the entire planet draw so many resources from the earth and emit so much waste into...

Living through the End of Nature

Read the thread →

Cinema and the automobile were born together, but the crash, not speed, is where film's critique becomes possible.

I hope you read the introduction first, as this would clarify my own stake in car crash films. I am constantly surprised that I have written a book on cinematic...

Crash

Read the thread →

Cinema and the automobile were born together, but the crash, not speed, is where film's critique becomes possible.

This book grew out of a number of different and at times very intense interactions, conversations and collaborative projects. Sometimes the conversations were in person, and in other instances they...

Crash

Read the thread →

In cinema, the car crash, not speed, is where critique of progress begins.

Crash explores the role of the car crash in film history and contemporary art practice. I begin by recognizing that the histories of cinema and the automobile, born at the same...

Crash

Read the thread →

Many undergraduates show no measurable gain in critical thinking because they are not asked to read or write much.

In recent years, many colleges and universities have been encouraging students to work in groups as a way to accomplish simultaneously two goals that were seen to be complementary. College...

Academically Adrift

Read the thread →

Many undergraduates show no measurable gain in critical thinking because they are not asked to read or write much.

Over the last three decades, many social scientists have written books examining learning in elementary and secondary education. But little has been written exploring similar questions empirically in higher education. The...

Academically Adrift

Read the thread →

Many undergraduates gain little in critical thinking because they are not asked to read or write much.

This book is based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)—a project in which my coauthor Josipa Roksa and I followed several thousand students across 24 diverse U.S. four-year colleges and...

Academically Adrift

Read the thread →

Nazi imperialism was still imperialism, driven as much by fear of rival empires as by ambition.

A brief introduction summarizes my argument, and in chapter 5 I also summarize Nazi imperialism. A reader might especially enjoy pages 139-143, chapter 3, which are about Hitler’s conceptions of “living...

Nazi Empire

Read the thread →

Nazi imperialism was still imperialism, driven as much by fear of rival empires as by ambition.

My teaching had a lot to do with the conceptualization of Nazi Empire. I teach a course on Nazi Germany in which I usually assign to students the controversial book by...

Nazi Empire

Read the thread →

Nazi imperialism was distinctive, but it was still imperialism.

As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire,...

Nazi Empire

Read the thread →

Urban policy should be judged by equity, democracy and diversity, not competitiveness, and justice is not delivered by process.

The concluding chapter of the book briefly traces the broad historical forces that formed the context for present urban policies. It explains the effects of national policies on metropolitan areas...

The Just City

Read the thread →

Cities should judge policy by equity, democracy and diversity, not by competitiveness.

Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of urban politics have criticized urban decision makers for imposing policies that exacerbated the disadvantages suffered by low-income, female, gay, and minority residents. In particular,...

The Just City

Read the thread →

Urban policy should be judged by equity, democracy and diversity, not competitiveness, and justice is not delivered by process.

For more than 30 years, cities in America and Europe have moved toward greater inequality—in line with the ideology of neo-liberalism, which urges privatization, limits on social welfare, and low...

The Just City

Read the thread →

Half of Russians still call Stalin a great leader because freed Gulag victims returned to live among their victimizers.

I hope that your “browsing reader” glances at the Prologue, the pages one through six. One informed reader said this must be the best short overview of Stalin’s terror ever...

The Victims Return

Read the thread →

Stalin's terror did not end at the camp gate.

While I focus on individuals, The Victims Return has a wide angle or broad context. The book begins with a short overview of Stalin’s mass terror, from 1929 to 1953, and...

The Victims Return

Read the thread →

Half of Russians still call Stalin a great leader because freed Gulag victims returned to live among their victimizers.

The story of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust is widely known. The story of surviving victims of Stalin’s 25-year terror is virtually unknown in the West—and even in Russia itself....

The Victims Return

Read the thread →

Pimps, traffickers and twenty million Chinese coolies, not Westernizing intellectuals, were the effective agents of Japanese imperialism.

This book is primarily an academic historical exercise and I have used some fairly abstract and philosophical language to describe what I see as the three distinct phases of Japanese...

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque

Read the thread →

Pimps, traffickers and twenty million Chinese coolies, not Westernizing intellectuals, were the effective agents of Japanese imperialism.

In addition to my new interpretation of Japanese sexology and sex practices in Asia, the three middle chapters of the book focus on the most commercially popular of Japan’s mass...

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque

Read the thread →

The real agents of Japanese imperialism were pimps, traffickers and coolies, not Westernizing intellectuals.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of Japan’s imperialism that emphasizes the crucial aspects of sexuality, desire and labor beginning around 1880 and ending with the nuclear terrorism of...

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque

Read the thread →

Companies that last a century beat the market by being intelligently conservative, not by bold bets on great ideas.

A section in Chapter 3 on how companies learn over time and across space is titled “Learning Stories.”Naturally, corporations love to tell heroic stories. They help to motivate people and...

Enduring Success

Read the thread →

Companies that last a century beat the market by being intelligently conservative, not by bold bets on great ideas.

I was always fascinated by the richness of history—and greatly frustrated that companies often spend millions on strategy evaluations without learning from their past experience or studying what they and...

Enduring Success

Read the thread →

Companies that last a century succeed by being intelligently conservative, not by bold bets.

In Enduring Success I address a key question in business today: How can companies succeed over time? I argue that companies are able to adapt to a constantly changing environment by...

Enduring Success

Read the thread →

A victim is believed only insofar as he appears to have mastered his suffering.

One claim I make in different ways in the book—and very explicitly in chapter 3—is that to be really credible, a victim has to appear to have mastered his or...

Aversion and Erasure

Read the thread →

A victim is believed only insofar as he appears to have mastered his suffering.

I was interested in all the talk in the media and in scholarly journals about how the Holocaust received “too much” attention and led us to ignore the plight of...

Aversion and Erasure

Read the thread →

A victim is believed only insofar as he appears to have mastered his suffering.

This book is about how the idea that the Holocaust of European Jews represents the most radical evil of our time shapes discussions of victims in general. The book shows how...

Aversion and Erasure

Read the thread →

Multitasking is a million-year-old species capacity, not a modern affliction, and monuments were built out of it from below.

Today, the reading experience has been expanded to different formats and time frames. So I have divided each chapter into smaller sections that make a particular point about some aspect...

A Prehistory of Ordinary People

Read the thread →

Multitasking is a million-year-old species capacity, not a modern affliction, and monuments were built out of it from below.

My interest in writing this book came from my most recent research on ancient urbanism. Cities are only about 6,000 years old, but our patterns of behavior and capacity for...

A Prehistory of Ordinary People

Read the thread →

Multitasking is not a modern affliction but a million-year-old human capacity.

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

A Prehistory of Ordinary People

Read the thread →

The arguments Clara Foltz made for a public defender are the arguments the movement still needs.

I hope the reader would happen on one of the eighteen or so accounts of cases Foltz had and causes she tried. They show her at her brave and skillful...

Woman Lawyer

Read the thread →

Clara Foltz's arguments for a public defender are the arguments the movement still needs.

Clara Foltz was a leader of two great movements: for women’s rights and for public defense. The book conceptualizes these two as connected in her person as well as in...

Woman Lawyer

Read the thread →

The arguments Clara Foltz made for a public defender are the arguments the movement still needs.

Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz is primarily a biography of an important figure in American legal history. Very famous in the late nineteenth century, she has been largely...

Woman Lawyer

Read the thread →

East Asia's four Sinicized states had five centuries of almost no war because the tribute system supplied the rules.

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...

East Asia Before the West

Read the thread →

East Asia's four Sinicized states had five centuries of almost no war because the tribute system supplied the rules.

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...

East Asia Before the West

Read the thread →

The tribute system kept East Asia's core states almost at peace with one another for five centuries.

My book set out to answer one general and seemingly simple question: How did international relations function in East Asia from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, before the arrival...

East Asia Before the West

Read the thread →

American houses were shaped by food, by dwellers rearranging space for storing, preserving, cooking and serving it.

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...

The Food Axis

Read the thread →

American houses were shaped by food.

Although my training in architectural history was very traditional—I studied the history of architects, their patrons, and buildings produced with high budgets and aesthetic ambitions—I became interested in how people...

The Food Axis

Read the thread →

American houses were shaped by food, by dwellers rearranging space for storing, preserving, cooking and serving it.

The Food Axis is an architectural history of the years from the first European settlement in the 17th century until today that approaches the understanding of domestic architecture through the...

The Food Axis

Read the thread →

The nineteenth-century sexual revolution was fought in sacred terms, and that is what made sex a private matter.

If a reader were just dipping into the book, I hope that he or she might first browse the fourth chapter.Against all odds, Craddock went about her work as a...

Heaven’s Bride

Read the thread →

The nineteenth-century sexual revolution was fought in sacred, not secular, terms.

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...

Heaven’s Bride

Read the thread →

The nineteenth-century sexual revolution was fought in sacred terms, and that is what made sex a private matter.

Heaven’s Bride tells for the first time the story of Ida C. Craddock’s life, death, and afterlife. A woman “very clever but queer,” as one contemporary described her, Craddock was a...

Heaven’s Bride

Read the thread →

The barricade outlived its usefulness against artillery because it recruited, built solidarity and sorted out leaders.

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...

The Insurgent Barricade

Read the thread →

The barricade outlived its usefulness against artillery because it recruited, built solidarity and sorted out leaders.

My interest in barricades was sparked by earlier research on the Parisian insurrections of February and June 1848. Like so many other aspects of French revolutionary history, the construction of...

The Insurgent Barricade

Read the thread →

The barricade outlived its military use because it built solidarity and sorted out leaders.

Although it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the barricade emerged as the preeminent symbol of the modern revolutionary tradition, its origins can be traced as...

The Insurgent Barricade

Read the thread →

We owe wild animals in distress nothing, and special care to the animals we bred into dependence.

I’d like a casual reader to start at the beginning, with the Introduction. That’s because in the Introduction, using recent media stories, I set up the key debate I pursue...

Animal Ethics in Context

Read the thread →

Our relation to an animal, not its capacities, creates our duty to help it.

Animal Ethics in Context attempts to offer something both to theoretical debates in animal ethics and to more practical concerns about animal treatment. Theoretically, animal ethicists have focused on the importance...

Animal Ethics in Context

Read the thread →

We owe wild animals in distress nothing, and special care to the animals we bred into dependence.

Animals inhabit diverse environments: our homes, our settlements, agricultural land, the wild. Some animals never directly encounter human beings. Others are deliberately created by us. Do these different contexts and...

Animal Ethics in Context

Read the thread →

Athens and Sparta fought over rank, not advantage, and anger rather than calculation decided their strategy.

Mount Helicon, sacred to the muses, looked down upon the great marsh of Copaïs, graveyard of cities. In heroic times men had cleared the limestone caverns that drained Copaïs to...

Song of Wrath

Read the thread →

Athens and Sparta fought over rank, not advantage.

It was as a child living in Japan that I first began to wonder about the connection between culture and foreign affairs. In the 70s and 80s China kept exploding...

Song of Wrath

Read the thread →

Athens and Sparta fought over rank, not advantage, and anger rather than calculation decided their strategy.

Most of the nutshells in this book end up broken: there is much fighting. Song of Wrath tells the story of the origins and course of the Archidamian War between...

Song of Wrath

Read the thread →

Beauty companies translated the prejudice that beauty is white into marketing and exported it worldwide.

There is no doubt in my mind that the place to start with this book is the illustrations. _Beauty Imagined _ includes over thirty color plates, and others in black...

Beauty Imagined

Read the thread →

Beauty companies translated the prejudice that beauty is white into marketing and exported it worldwide.

I am sometimes asked what a grown man, let alone a Harvard business professor, is doing with a history of the beauty industry. Underlying the question is the assumption that...

Beauty Imagined

Read the thread →

Beauty companies did not invent the idea that beauty is white, but they exported it worldwide.

This book tells the story of how a small, often morally dubious, craft industry in the nineteenth century grew to be the $330 billion global powerhouse. There are many books written...

Beauty Imagined

Read the thread →

Obama won in 2008 by becoming a collective representation, not through demographics, money or organization.

If you were to just pick up The Performance of Politics in a bookstore—perhaps attracted by the striking cover photo of Obama striding confidently to a podium in Denver to...

The Performance of Politics

Read the thread →

Obama won in 2008 by becoming a collective representation, not through demographics, money or organization.

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

The Performance of Politics

Read the thread →

Obama won in 2008 by becoming a collective representation, not through demographics, money or organization.

The Performance of Politics offers a new explanation for Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. Rather than demographics, strategy, and money, the argument focuses on cultural meaning making, symbolic creativity, and...

The Performance of Politics

Read the thread →

Macbeth, not only Othello, sits at the center of American racial construction.

So that we might learn what it means to remember one facet of our cultural legacy, we include in the book some two dozen concise essays addressing everything from Frederick...

Weyward Macbeth

Read the thread →

Macbeth, not only Othello, sits at the center of American racial construction.

While Macbeth may not fit neatly into the category of a “race” play, like a specter it is nevertheless haunted by, and haunts, the language and performances of race. Othello, in...

Weyward Macbeth

Read the thread →

Macbeth, not only Othello, sits at the center of American racial construction.

There are plans in the works for a multiracial film version of Macbeth. Like the famous 1936 production that Orson Welles directed in Harlem, this adaptation is to be set...

Weyward Macbeth

Read the thread →

The German woman warrior is a male fantasy who must be tamed by rape, death or both.

There is one woman warrior of ancient provenance who kills the general of the foreign army who is threatening her people, helps to raise a siege and bring about a...

Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present

Read the thread →

The German woman warrior is a male fantasy who must be tamed by rape, death or both.

How I came to write the book was that I was asked about 10 years ago to give a lecture about real women who masqueraded as men and who took...

Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present

Read the thread →

The German woman warrior is a male fantasy who must be tamed by rape, death or both.

This book examines the huge number of artistic representations of women warriors that exist in German from the Renaissance to the present—on the stage, in the opera house, on the...

Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present

Read the thread →

Writing religion into a constitution is a prudent strategy by secularists to contain it.

The book explores the world of constitutional theocracies through six different lenses. First, I define constitutional theocracy and describe its basic tenets, functioning, and intrinsic existential tensions. These embedded disharmonies pose...

Constitutional Theocracy

Read the thread →

Writing religion into a constitution is a prudent strategy by secularists to contain it.

As of 2010, perhaps more than half of the world’s population lives in polities where religion not only has remained public but also has been playing a key role in...

Constitutional Theocracy

Read the thread →

Writing religion into a constitution is a prudent way for secularists to contain it.

Religion and the belief in God have made a major comeback. From the fundamentalist turn in predominantly Islamic polities to the spread of Catholicism and Pentecostalism in the global south,...

Constitutional Theocracy

Read the thread →

Morton's thousand skulls are debris from conquered places where people were too devastated to bury their own dead.

It seems pretty clear that none of those whose skulls wound up on museum shelves imagined their body parts cleaned, measured and put on display. To figure out what nasty...

The Skull Collectors

Read the thread →

Morton's skull collection is a record of global catastrophe, not only of bad racial science.

When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...

The Skull Collectors

Read the thread →

Morton's thousand skulls are debris from conquered places where people were too devastated to bury their own dead.

When he died in 1851, Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia doctor, left behind a collection of more than a thousand human skulls. Not the grisly byproduct of botched operations, but...

The Skull Collectors

Read the thread →

Imperialism became popular in Britain and France through charismatic heroes, and their charisma was unrelated to accomplishment.

My hope is that the book’s opening paragraph will do what a lead paragraph is supposed to do: make browsers want to read on. I open with the young French army...

Heroes of Empire

Read the thread →

Imperialism became popular in Britain and France through charismatic heroes, and their charisma was unrelated to accomplishment.

There are two main contexts for this book, the first of which has to do with Barack Obama and charisma. I began work on this book when the then junior senator...

Heroes of Empire

Read the thread →

Imperialism became popular in Britain and France through charismatic heroes, not territory or trade.

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...

Heroes of Empire

Read the thread →

Today's digital communities inherit their ethos of sharing from the radio experimenters who fought the BBC monopoly.

A casual browser could do worse than start around p.189, with the story of Oliver Smedley and Kitty Black’s raid on the Shivering Sands fort. Shivering Sands was an old World...

Death of a Pirate

Read the thread →

Today's digital culture of sharing descends from radio experimenters who fought the BBC's monopoly.

Death of a Pirate tells a story about the politics of media from the 1920s to the present. Broadcasting was something radically new when it arrived after World War I, and...

Death of a Pirate

Read the thread →

Today's digital communities inherit their ethos of sharing from the radio experimenters who fought the BBC monopoly.

This book is about pirate radio, which was a major enterprise in Britain in the Sixties. I focus on a clash between two of the most important pirate entrepreneurs, which culminated...

Death of a Pirate

Read the thread →

American conservatism's ideals, applied consistently, inevitably produce racism, because what was established here was white supremacy.

A section of Chapter 8 on the ascendancy of Reagan to the presidency is titled “It’s the Ideology, Stupid.” President Reagan is a central character in the book, because he...

Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same

Read the thread →

American conservatism, applied consistently, produces racism, because what it conserves is white supremacy.

This is first a book about ideas and how they can have consequences in politics, if they are linked to powerful, well-financed movements. I excavate the ideas on race of the...

Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same

Read the thread →

American conservatism's ideals, applied consistently, inevitably produce racism, because what was established here was white supremacy.

In this book I systematically demonstrate the inescapable racism inherent in American conservatism. The argument unfolds in layers. First, I show that ideological conservatism is everywhere and always the conscious and...

Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same

Read the thread →

Chicago is now an arts-rich global city, and its inherited images obstruct seeing what it actually is.

The Third City’s second chapter walks the reader through a series of Chicago literatures: sociological analyses, city planning documents aiming to describe future Chicagos, contemporary fiction set in Chicago, the...

The Third City

Read the thread →

Chicago is now an arts-rich global city, not the Rustbelt second city.

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...

The Third City

Read the thread →

Chicago is now an arts-rich global city, and its inherited images obstruct seeing what it actually is.

The Third City is an unconventional interpretation and explanation of contemporary Chicago. By exploring this iconic American city, I comment on broader trends in American urbanism. And what I mean by...

The Third City

Read the thread →

The fourteen million murdered between Berlin and Moscow from 1933 to 1945 died in a single event.

Probably the last page in the book is the most important to me.One of my main purposes was to show how many people were killed—starved, gassed, shot—in the Bloodlands between...

Bloodlands

Read the thread →

The fourteen million murdered between Berlin and Moscow from 1933 to 1945 died in a single event.

I'm a historian of eastern Europe, I'm a specialist in this region.I've noticed that in general my colleagues avoid the larger tragedies that struck the lands we've studied, such as...

Bloodlands

Read the thread →

The fourteen million murdered between Berlin and Moscow from 1933 to 1945 died in a single event.

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call...

Bloodlands

Read the thread →

Japanese colonial nostalgia for Korean folk culture turned it into the emblem of nationality for post-liberation Korea.

The first chapter, “A Long Engagement,” provides a narrative overview of the Japan-Korea relationship until the end of World War II. I could have relied exclusively on secondary works by...

Primitive Selves

Read the thread →

Japanese colonial nostalgia for Korean folk culture turned it into the emblem of nationality for post-liberation Korea.

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...

Primitive Selves

Read the thread →

Japanese colonial nostalgia turned Korean folk culture into an emblem of Korean nationhood.

Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...

Primitive Selves

Read the thread →

Modern American urban culture was made in the YMCA's hundreds of near-identical, undistinguished buildings.

One of the most intriguing visual elements of Manhood Factories is the extensive reproduction of postcards from the more than 10,000 items preserved in the Cliff Smith YMCA Postcard Collection...

Manhood Factories

Read the thread →

Modern American urban culture was made in ordinary buildings like the YMCA, not in monuments.

The American Young Men’s Christian Association, which began as a Protestant evangelical voluntary association in the 1850s, built hundreds of buildings in the years between the Civil War and the...

Manhood Factories

Read the thread →

Modern American urban culture was made in the YMCA's hundreds of near-identical, undistinguished buildings.

Although it engages directly with the fields of architectural history, gender studies, and urban history this book is really for anyone who has ever gone swimming, or played a game...

Manhood Factories

Read the thread →

Unselfish behavior is common and switched on by social cues, so law should trigger conscience rather than price conduct.

On a warm summer evening in Los Angeles, Franco Gonzales, an undocumented immigrant working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, was waiting alone at a bus stop. An armored...

Cultivating Conscience

Read the thread →

Unselfish behavior is common and switched on by social cues, so law should trigger conscience rather than price conduct.

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...

Cultivating Conscience

Read the thread →

Law should trigger conscience, the cheapest police force there is, rather than price conduct.

This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves? Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards, and who can’t be trusted to do a good job or refrain from lying, cheating and stealing—unless given the right “incentives.”

Cultivating Conscience

Read the thread →

The War of 1812 was a civil war among kindred peoples, and its stalemate made Canada and the United States.

Between 1792 and 1812, about 30,000 Americans left the republic to seek land in Upper Canada. They became known as the “Late Loyalists,” but most were just looking for the...

The Civil War of 1812

Read the thread →

The War of 1812 was a civil war among kindred peoples, and its stalemate made Canada and the United States.

I came to see the War of 1812 as a civil war between kindred peoples, recently and incompletely divided by the revolution. To call the War of 1812 a “civil...

The Civil War of 1812

Read the thread →

The War of 1812 was a civil war among kindred peoples.

This book examines the War of 1812 between the American republic, the British empire, and their Indian allies. Most of the fighting took place in the hotly contested region between Montreal,...

The Civil War of 1812

Read the thread →

Copying is constitutive of being human, not a lapse from originality.

Although I purposefully avoided paying excessive attention to computers, the internet and social media, I think that there is a strong and helpful analysis of those things in my book. One...

In Praise of Copying

Read the thread →

Copying is constitutive of being human, not a lapse from originality.

The book is intended to be a primer on copying: each chapter examines some aspect of copying, from the core philosophical issue as to what a copy is, the history...

In Praise of Copying

Read the thread →

Copying is constitutive of being human, not a lapse from originality.

What you’re reading right now is a copy. I’m using only words taken and recycled from other places. You probably do it too. Even the questions you’re asking are copies, repetitions. You...

In Praise of Copying

Read the thread →

The apartment plot is a genre, not a setting, and it dominated American film from 1945 to 1975.

The chapter on the bachelor, “We Like our Apartment: The Playboy Indoors” offers readers a fun way into the book. Much of it deals with the way in which Playboy...

The Apartment Plot

Read the thread →