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The readymades do not abandon painting, they show that art cannot be defined at all.

The book’s title Drawing on art: Duchamp and Company refers to Marcel Duchamp’s literal defacement of the Mona Lisa image—and also to its figurative meaning, the treatment of art as...

Drawing on Art

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Moral evil starts in certitude, and doubt and hesitancy are positive conditions of good action.

A book reveals itself in its fullness, in its sweat and swagger. But if you must rivet attention on one thing in this volume then I would hope that it...

Morality's Muddy Waters

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Moral evil starts in certainty, not confusion.

As an historian, everything I do is anchored in a concern with the past presented in what I hope is a lively narrative. In walking along that path in this...

Morality's Muddy Waters

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Moral evil starts in certitude, and doubt and hesitancy are positive conditions of good action.

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...

Morality's Muddy Waters

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The concept of nature has had its day and is now an obstacle.

If I were yelling at someone from a fast moving train and had only one chance to say one thing about my book before they went out of earshot, I...

The Ecological Thought

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The concept of nature has had its day and is now an obstacle.

Since I was quite little I wanted to be a biologist; then I wanted to study ecology. I grew up in the UK and I saw David Attenborough’s Life on...

The Ecological Thought

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The concept of nature has had its day and is now an obstacle.

All life forms are interconnected. We share our DNA with chimps (98%) but also with daffodils (35%). We drive cars that burn crushed dinosaurs. The oxygen we breathe is the...

The Ecological Thought

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The United States is an empire and aspired to be one from its origin, with liberty as its engine.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that most readers will first want to take a look at the Paul Wolfowitz chapter. As a public intellectual with a Ph.D. as well...

Empire for Liberty

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The United States is an empire and aspired to be one from its origin, with liberty as its engine.

In fundamental respects, I’ve been writing this book my entire professional life. Yet, no less fundamentally, the book is the product of “presentist” concerns. I became a historian in part because...

Empire for Liberty

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The United States has been an empire from the start, with liberty as its engine.

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...

Empire for Liberty

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Americans today are not more mobile, less religious or more consumerist than their ancestors, and what changed is security.

I would like to highlight just two passages. The first is from the start of Chapter 2: In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He...

Made in America

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Americans today are not more mobile, less religious or more consumerist than their ancestors, and what changed is security.

In many of the fiercest debates of our day—for example, about religion, government, family policy, health, even about personal relationships—people draw on vague notions of how things “used to be.” But...

Made in America

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American character has been surprisingly consistent for three centuries.

Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past. The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial...

Made in America

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The Thirty Years War was neither inevitable nor a religious conflict.

When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a...

The Thirty Years War

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The Thirty Years War was neither inevitable nor a religious conflict.

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...

The Thirty Years War

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The Thirty Years War was neither inevitable nor a religious conflict.

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was the most destructive conflict in European history prior to the twentieth-century world wars. The War was a struggle over the political and religious order...

The Thirty Years War

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Calvin wanted Servetus dead and prepared the case, but had no authority to condemn him.

There is no more controversial aspect of Calvin’s life than the execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva in the fall of 1553, an event I treat on pages 217-228, in...

Calvin

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Calvin was neither the father of capitalism nor a tyrant, but a man of contrary impulses.

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

Calvin

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Calvin wanted Servetus dead and prepared the case, but had no authority to condemn him.

After five hundred years John Calvin remains the object of admiration and loathing. For some he is revered as the great reformer of the sixteenth century whose legacy embraces both...

Calvin

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An international agreement can be legally binding even when it cannot be enforced.

My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In...

The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

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A norm's legal bindingness does not depend on the bindingness of the consequences for violating it.

I decided to write this book after a personal incident that took place more than a decade ago—with which I begin the introductory chapter. I was living in Seattle at the...

The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

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A norm's legal bindingness does not depend on the bindingness of the consequences for violating it.

How and why do international environmental norms arise? In what ways do they affect behavior? Do they change what states and individuals actually do, and, if so, why? How effective...

The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

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Beijing's red guard factions came from the same politically reliable families and fought because China's leaders were divided.

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,...

Fractured Rebellion

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Beijing's red guards fought because China's leaders were divided, not because their social interests differed.

I’m challenging a way of thinking about politics common in fields like sociology and political science—the one in which people have interests based on their jobs, their levels of education,...

Fractured Rebellion

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Beijing's red guard factions came from the same politically reliable families and fought because China's leaders were divided.

It seems that almost everyone has heard of Chairman Mao and China’s Cultural Revolution and the “red guards” of the late 1960s. The “red guards” were students who rampaged through...

Fractured Rebellion

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All movement is already relational, composing spacetimes rather than crossing space.

A reader encountering Relationscapes in a bookstore might find themselves attracted to the front cover, which is a reproduction of a painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kngwarreye. This might...

Relationscapes

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All movement is already relational, composing spacetimes rather than crossing space.

Relationscapes is a very Whiteheadian book. From the outset, it philosophically attempts to lay out a process philosophy and to outline how Alfred North Whitehead’s thought is in conversation with...

Relationscapes

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All movement is already relational, composing spacetimes rather than crossing space.

Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch,...

Relationscapes

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Facing the D.C. sniper, the press embraced fear and the schools chose coping, each pushed by its own structures.

To gain a sense of the immediacy of coverage, turn to page 53 to begin a sample of the panicky reporting when the sniper was on the loose. These pages detail...

On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper

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During the D.C. sniper attacks, the press embraced fear while the schools chose coping.

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that...

On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper

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Facing the D.C. sniper, the press embraced fear and the schools chose coping, each pushed by its own structures.

On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper tells the story of the press coverage of the deeds of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo as they traversed the Washington D.C. area...

On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper

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The Sea Venture chronicles were an important catalyst for The Tempest, and two Powhatans were almost surely aboard.

If a reader were to ask where to sample a page or two of A Brave Vessel, I would suggest turning to the beginning of chapter five. At that point...

A Brave Vessel

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The Sea Venture chronicles were an important catalyst for The Tempest, and two Powhatans were almost surely aboard.

I discovered the story of the Sea Venture while I was researching the life of Pocahontas, whose future husband was one of the Bermuda castaways. Soon after learning the broad...

A Brave Vessel

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The Sea Venture shipwreck accounts were an important catalyst for The Tempest.

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

A Brave Vessel

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Counterfactual argument is a necessary instrument of causal inference, and historians who reject it smuggle it in badly.

Good books draw in readers in their opening pages. I hope Forbidden Fruit does the same. In those pages I justify my choice of title. I also explain the need for...

Forbidden Fruit

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Counterfactual argument is a necessary instrument of causal inference, and historians who reject it smuggle it in badly.

History and social science largely rest on Humean causation: the belief in causes that can be established by something approaching a constant conjunction between two events, one envisaged as a...

Forbidden Fruit

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Counterfactual argument is a necessary tool of causal inference.

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...

Forbidden Fruit

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The difficult New York art of around 1960 was an attempt to understand the city's deindustrialization.

Probably the part of the book I like best is the chapter on Donald Judd’s Minimalist sculptures; if someone were to casually flip through and land on a section to...

The Disappearance of Objects

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The difficult New York art of around 1960 was an attempt to understand the city's deindustrialization.

I came to this topic as an art historian, trying to make sense of some art I really liked but couldn’t understand or explain. As I looked at the art...

The Disappearance of Objects

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The difficult New York art of around 1960 was an attempt to understand the city's deindustrialization.

New York’s artists around 1960 were living in the shadows of the city’s deindustrialization—moving among demolition sites, abandoned factories, and decrepit hardware stores, while all around them new highways, sleek...

The Disappearance of Objects

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Nostalgia is a category for critical reflection, and Shanghai's regional foodways are an objection to modernity.

One very important point I try to make in my book is that the Communist Party did not set out to destroy Chinese food, as many Western visitors to China...

Culinary Nostalgia

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Nostalgia is a category for critical reflection, and Shanghai's regional foodways are an objection to modernity.

Culinary Nostalgia evolved out of my attempt to make sense of an unexpected turn in my research. I set out looking for the various ways that Shanghai people used food...

Culinary Nostalgia

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Nostalgia is not a pathology but a way of reflecting critically on a changing world.

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...

Culinary Nostalgia

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Europe's social capitalism outperforms American and Chinese capitalism on health, security, sustainability and even growth.

If a browsing reader were to encounter Europe’s Promise in the bookstore, I would like her or him to read the final few pages, and contemplate the final scene and...

Europe’s Promise

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Europe's social capitalism outperforms American and Chinese capitalism on health, security, sustainability and even growth.

The world faces two major challenges in the 21st century. First, how do we advance the institutions and practices capable of enacting a desirable quality of life for a burgeoning...

Europe’s Promise

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Europe's social capitalism outperforms both American and Chinese capitalism.

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...

Europe’s Promise

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Disco broadened blackness, femininity and male homosexuality, and without it there is no route from Diana Ross to Lil' Kim.

Histories of disco emphasize the antagonism between rock and disco, and with good reason. Rock publications covered the glitter-ball world begrudgingly and/or sneeringly. Rock radio was even more hostile. Punk...

Hot Stuff

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Disco broadened blackness, femininity and male homosexuality, and without it there is no route from Diana Ross to Lil' Kim.

Like my biography of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff is meant to engage both scholars and interested readers outside the academy. This is my second book to wrestle with the popular...

Hot Stuff

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Disco was not a throwaway soundtrack but a force that broadened blackness, femininity and male homosexuality.

Hot Stuff is a cultural history of disco that is at once scholarly and popular. The book charts disco’s trajectory—from its steamy beginnings in Manhattan’s gay clubs through its Blob-like...

Hot Stuff

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Engineering runs ahead of science, rockets before rocket science, so science alone will not solve climate and energy problems.

Chapter 3, entitled “Which Came First?”, goes over a number of examples of engineering achievements that were accomplished without full scientific understanding or explanation of the phenomena involved. Among those...

The Essential Engineer

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Engineering runs ahead of science, rockets before rocket science, so science alone will not solve climate and energy problems.

This book relates to the nature and to the practice of research and development. I write as an engineer who has been involved with many aspects of the profession, including...

The Essential Engineer

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Engineering is not a branch of science but often runs ahead of it.

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...

The Essential Engineer

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Early American cinema's handling of race ran on the Picturesque, inherited from painting, prints and photography.

If someone were to flip casually through the pages of the book, I would hope that they would appreciate, and be intrigued by, its variety of illustrations. Of course I do...

Italy in Early American Cinema

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Early American cinema's handling of race ran on the Picturesque, inherited from painting, prints and photography.

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...

Italy in Early American Cinema

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Early American cinema's handling of race was inherited from the Picturesque in painting and photography.

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

Italy in Early American Cinema

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Science fiction is a better instrument than serious literature for thinking about political violence.

Is mass violence justified if it brings about a better world? This question has been raised frequently in relation to communism, as crimes of Stalin and Mao exposed the murderous...

From Utopia to Apocalypse

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Science fiction is a better instrument than serious literature for thinking about political violence.

I had not undertaken any scholarly studies of science fiction or popular culture prior to writing this book—my graduate work had focused on the aesthetics of literary modernism. But the...

From Utopia to Apocalypse

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Science fiction is a better tool than serious literature for thinking about political violence.

From Utopia to Apocalypse is a study of political upheaval and revolutionary change, as they are portrayed in works of speculative and science fiction. It is my contention that science...

From Utopia to Apocalypse

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The US military confronted the legacies of the civil rights struggles more directly than the universities or the courts.

If someone began thumbing randomly through this book, I’d hope that it would fall open to page 168–not because that’s where I make a particularly powerful point or lay out...

America's Army

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The US military confronted the legacies of the civil rights struggles more directly than the universities or the courts.

I meant this book to change some conversations. Military history draws a lot of people who read serious non-fiction, but it occupies a complicated place in the academic discipline of...

America's Army

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The US military, not universities or courts, most directly confronted the legacies of civil rights struggles.

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over...

America's Army

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Helen's absence from the story she sets in motion is her essence, and every retelling attempts a closure beauty refuses.

No one can write about Helen of Troy without thinking about the meaning of beauty. Consider the following statements about Helen’s beauty. Here is Guido delle Colonne writing in the thirteenth...

Helen of Troy

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Helen's absence from the story she sets in motion is her essence.

This book took me many years to write—longer than the Trojan War itself took. At Oxford University, where I teach, students study every period of English Literature from 800 CE...

Helen of Troy

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Helen's absence from the story she sets in motion is her essence, and every retelling attempts a closure beauty refuses.

This is a literary biography of Helen of Troy. It is not a historical life of a Bronze Age princess or a study of mythology; it is not an account...

Helen of Troy

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The genial, wisecracking Twain of his last years is a fiction Twain engineered himself.

The beginning of Chapter Two sets the stage for understanding what an unusual position Twain occupied at the end of his life.Due to his longevity, Twain had almost become a...

Mark Twain’s Other Woman

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The genial, wisecracking Twain of his last years is a fiction Twain engineered himself.

Mark Twain biography remains rooted in an outworn tradition that too often rewards pedantry and tortured prose. In the beginning, Twain biography featured politically savvy scholars who avoided controversial topics...

Mark Twain’s Other Woman

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The genial, wisecracking Mark Twain of his last years is a fiction Twain engineered himself.

An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910. Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place...

Mark Twain’s Other Woman

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The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a social science state, and Durkheim mattered as much as Marx.

Lost the Collective reconstructs the rituals that developed in response to suicides among members of the Bolshevik Party and demonstrates how these practices helped to promote a particular vision of...

Lost to the Collective

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The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a social science state, and Durkheim mattered as much as Marx.

I first became interested in the problem of Soviet suicide after reading a footnote about a dramatic spike in suicides among Bolsheviks (or Communists) during the 1920s. Such an outburst...

Lost to the Collective

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The 1920s Soviet Union was a social science state, not just a product of Marxism.

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences. Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...

Lost to the Collective

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The Depression documentary book deconstructs witness, confronting readers with scattered voices rather than an authoritative picture.

Earlier, I began to develop a contrast between Wright’s first person plural in 12 Million Black Voices and Roosevelt’s rhetorical performance of “seeing” the economic violence wrought on the poorest...

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

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The Depression documentary book deconstructs witness, confronting readers with scattered voices rather than an authoritative picture.

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...

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

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The Depression documentary book does not bear witness, it takes witnessing apart.

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

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The American city is a product of possessive spectatorship, learned from the camera, cinema, radio and the networked computer.

Chapter 7, on the topic of the database city, is probably my favorite chapter. In it, I examine the development in Hollywood, California known as Hollywood and Highland. This urban...

The Urban Spectator

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The American city is a product of possessive spectatorship, learned from the camera, cinema, radio and the networked computer.

I started writing this book as part of my graduate work in media studies. I was interested in cities and found myself attracted to how cities were represented in films....

The Urban Spectator

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Media habits shape not only how American cities are seen but how they are built.

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have...

The Urban Spectator

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Sacco and Vanzetti were executed because of the worldwide protest on their behalf, not in spite of it.

The end of chapter 2, pages 95-100, just before the book’s gallery of photos, deals with one of the biggest questions I faced when doing the research: why, in fact,...

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair

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Sacco and Vanzetti were executed because of the worldwide protest on their behalf, not in spite of it.

The book started as an attempt on my part to combine my interests in modern American and European history. I was trained in both fields but didn’t want to write...

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair

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Sacco and Vanzetti were executed because of the worldwide protest on their behalf, not in spite of it.

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair

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The monumental core of Washington is a mid twentieth-century invention, and clearing the Mall was early urban renewal.

The completion in 1884 of the Washington Monument—the great obelisk in the center of the Mall—is the pivotal moment in the book’s larger narrative. While the project began in the...

Monument Wars

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The monumental core of Washington looks eternal but is a mid twentieth-century invention.

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

Monument Wars

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The monumental core of Washington is a mid twentieth-century invention, and clearing the Mall was early urban renewal.

The monumental core of Washington, D.C. is a great axis of public space, almost two miles long, stretching from the Grant Memorial below the U.S. Capitol building to the Lincoln...

Monument Wars

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Russian revolutionary terrorism grew from deep Christian soil, and Zasulich's dream of martyrdom came from reading the Bible.

In the mid 1870s, thousands of wealthy young people, many no more than eighteen years of age, left their luxurious homes, good schools, and comfortable clothing to live like ordinary...

Angel of Vengeance

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Russian revolutionary terrorism grew from deep Christian soil, and Zasulich's dream of martyrdom came from reading the Bible.

From the instant I read about the trial of Vera Zasulich, I knew that I wanted to write a book about her. The bare facts of her case were so...

Angel of Vengeance

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Russian revolutionary terrorism grew from deep Christian soil.

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

Angel of Vengeance

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Conservatism has no fixed content, so the American Civil War was a fight between two conservatisms.

Half way through the book I make the argument that Theodore Roosevelt and some of his distinguished contemporaries can be thought of as conservatives. TR never needed to make money...

The Conservatives

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Conservatism has no fixed content, so the American Civil War was a fight between two conservatisms.

The U.S.A. was the product of a successful revolution so it may seem paradoxical to regard many of its leading figures as conservative. However, they recognized their achievement as fragile,...

The Conservatives

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Conservatism has no fixed content but defends a cherished civilization against whatever threat is current.

“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...

The Conservatives

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Pop around 1989 registered the disappearance of the century's organizing antagonism, and the cost was the capacity to think historically.

I think in some sense any portion of the book will give a sense of it at the level of the writing, the way it wants to talk about its...

1989

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Pop around 1989 registered the disappearance of the century's organizing antagonism, and the cost was the capacity to think historically.

1989, in the most basic terms, is a synthesis of cultural criticism and political science, toward an understanding of a complex and important social convulsion. There is a lot of Public...

1989

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Pop music around 1989 recorded the end of the century's defining conflict as loss, not victory.

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions,...

1989

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Economics explains why North and South clashed better than slavery does.

Here are my suggestions for browsing Clash of Extremes. Begin with the Introduction: it provides a brief overview and roadmap for the rest of the book. Then take a look...

Clash of Extremes

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Economics explains why North and South clashed better than slavery does.

Several principles shape the book. First, the story of the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath is told with a focus on individuals. Readers will encounter lawmaker Thaddeus...

Clash of Extremes

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Economics, not slavery, best explains why North and South clashed.

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...

Clash of Extremes

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Jeanneret borrowed and plagiarized Freemasonry's symbols to win commissions from a ruling class that sat in the lodges.

There are 170 illustrations in Le Corbusier and the Occult. And they are not just pretty pictures. Some of them tell stories in their right. One reviewer said that he could...

Le Corbusier and the Occult

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Le Corbusier borrowed Masonic symbols to win commissions from a ruling class that sat in the lodges.

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...

Le Corbusier and the Occult

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Jeanneret borrowed and plagiarized Freemasonry's symbols to win commissions from a ruling class that sat in the lodges.

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, alias Le Corbusier, borrowed, plagiarized and instrumentalised the ideas and symbols of Swiss and French Freemasonry and trade guilds, the compagnonnages. The ruling elites of La Chaux-de-Fonds (where Jeanneret...

Le Corbusier and the Occult

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Human nature is bio-cultural and prosocial by default, and the Hobbesian reading of New Orleans after Katrina was simply wrong.

The recent earthquake in Haiti echoed—on a much larger scale—the events of Hurricane Katrina, provoking a depressingly familiar reaction from the authorities responsible for militarizing or “securitizing” relief efforts.In Chapter...

Political Affect

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Human nature is bio-cultural and prosocial by default, and the Hobbesian reading of New Orleans after Katrina was simply wrong.

What I wanted to do in Political Affect was write a book on advances in the sciences that would use a continental figure (Deleuze) as part of its theoretical basis,...

Political Affect

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Human nature's default setting is cooperative, not competitive.

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...

Political Affect

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