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The Puerto Rican commonwealth is not a colonial way station but a distinct political form.

Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican...

Mainland Passage

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One anti-communist impulse moderated the American Left and modernized the American Right.

The emotional center of this book lies in its epilogue. Here the style of writing changes, it slows down and becomes less analytical and more impressionistic. The epilogue sketches a...

The Conservative Turn

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One anti-communist impulse moderated the American Left and modernized the American Right.

The Conservative Turn began, alas, as a dissertation, which is one reason why it’s based on archival research. I had entered graduate school with an interest in the Russian Revolution...

The Conservative Turn

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One anti-communist impulse moderated the American Left and modernized the American Right.

The Conservative Turn is an intellectual history of American anti-communism told through the biographies of two intellectuals, Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who met as Columbia undergraduates in the 1920s. Both...

The Conservative Turn

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9/11 did not change American storytelling.

The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...

Firestorm

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9/11 did not change American storytelling, and the incisive work on it came from documentary filmmakers, not Hollywood.

I cover the range of filmmaking elicited by 9/11 by placing it in several frameworks. One of the most important is provided by the historical context of the events. The...

Firestorm

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9/11 did not change American storytelling, and the incisive work on it came from documentary filmmakers, not Hollywood.

9/11 was one of the most photographed events in history, and in the years that followed numerous films investigated, profiled and sought to understand what happened on that day and...

Firestorm

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Postwar American fiction is the product of the creative writing program, which is creativity's medium rather than its antagonist.

A reader riffling through the pages of my book might be struck to see that a work of literary history has so many diagrams. What’s up with that? Don’t we...

The Program Era

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Postwar American fiction is the product of the creative writing program, which is creativity's medium rather than its antagonist.

I came to this book when I was finishing my first book, The Novel Art, which was about how early twentieth century American writers negotiated their relation to mass culture...

The Program Era

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The creative writing program is not the enemy of postwar American fiction but its medium.

As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts...

The Program Era

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The early Muslim community added one letter to the Qur'an to protect the doctrine that prophecy ends with Muhammad.

The non-specialist who is browsing through the book should turn to chapter one, where I discuss the foundation narratives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is interesting that all three...

Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men

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Camps are instruments of inquiry, the first places where local and global forces register.

When I last flipped through Camps, I paused at three moments that give a sense of the range of possibilities, realities, and complexities in the book. Each stopping point includes...

Camps

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The early Muslim community revised one word of the Qur'an to make Muhammad the last prophet.

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men

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The early Muslim community added one letter to the Qur'an to protect the doctrine that prophecy ends with Muhammad.

Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men is about the Islamic assertion that Muhammad was the last in a series of prophets sent by God to mankind...

Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men

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Camps are not symptoms of crisis but instruments of inquiry.

In the book, I argue that camp spaces are an inexorable environment – one that is unique because it is always being built or rebuilt, always becoming. With this in...

Camps

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Camps are instruments of inquiry, the first places where local and global forces register.

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...

Camps

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American writers between 1870 and 1920 borrowed the shock, speed and danger of the mass culture they denounced.

One area of literary culture from this period presented a striking puzzle. Whereas most serious writers looked at mass culture with disdain and alarm, there were important exceptions. I came...

Frantic Panoramas

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American writers between 1870 and 1920 borrowed the shock, speed and danger of the mass culture they denounced.

My book joins an ongoing debate about how we should think about reason. In recent decades, literary scholars have been somewhat skeptical about the high value nineteenth-century intellectuals placed on different...

Frantic Panoramas

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Turn-of-the-century American writers borrowed the shock and speed of the mass culture they denounced.

My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...

Frantic Panoramas

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Birthright citizenship is inherited property like the banned medieval entail, and the lucky owe a privilege levy.

By treating the automatic and perpetual transmission of citizenship by birth as a weak moral link, resembling the property regimes of old that are now deeply discredited and banned, The...

The Birthright Lottery

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Birthright citizenship is inherited property like the banned medieval entail, and the lucky owe a privilege levy.

I began writing this book when I was nine months pregnant. Having just completed a fellowship as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton I returned to...

The Birthright Lottery

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Birthright citizenship is inherited property, much like the banned medieval entail.

The Birthright Lottery proposes a new way of thinking about the intergenerational transfer of citizenship as a special kind of property inheritance. It emphasizes the significance of citizenship – perhaps...

The Birthright Lottery

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The Night Café encodes Van Gogh's sense of life's meaning, clue by clue, resting on a parable from Luke.

Page one of the book invites the reader into the actual “Night Café” on Tuesday evening, September 4,1888, when Vincent Van Gogh set up his easel to spend three nights...

Mystery of the Night Café

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The Night Café encodes Van Gogh's sense of life's meaning, clue by clue, resting on a parable from Luke.

Mystery of the Night Café not only seeks to solve the mystery of Van Gogh’s deepest sense of life, a sense that has attracted many around the globe, but it...

Mystery of the Night Café

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Van Gogh's paintings are spiritual autobiography, aimed at comfort and healing.

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...

Mystery of the Night Café

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Shakespeare was an international commodity before he was a national poet, advertised at the Frankfurt book fair in 1622.

I guess I’d direct a browsing reader to my last essay: any writer is always most interested in his or her current work.A colleague, Margaret Ferguson, observed over twenty years...

Essaying Shakespeare

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Shakespeare was an international commodity before he was a national poet, advertised at the Frankfurt book fair in 1622.

At Berkeley where I did my graduate work in comparative literature in the 1970s, there were no courses on women, or race, or ethnicity. No one read women writers much...

Essaying Shakespeare

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Shakespeare was an international commodity before he was a national poet.

Essaying Shakespeare, as its title suggests, is a collection of essays about Shakespeare. To” essay” means both to try or attempt, and to put to the test. Written and published over...

Essaying Shakespeare

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What we want from film, love, violence, hide-and-seek, the supernatural, comes from innate mammalian and hunter-gatherer dispositions.

One of the chapters in Embodied Visions, “Love and Desire in the Cinema,” deals with romantic films and pornography. The motivation for writing it was that the dominant constructivist film...

Embodied Visions

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What we want from film, love, violence, hide-and-seek, the supernatural, comes from innate mammalian and hunter-gatherer dispositions.

For decades the dominant theoretical framework for film studies (and for the humanities in general) has been a strong version of what is called “social constructionism.” The basic idea here...

Embodied Visions

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What we love in film comes from inborn mammalian and hunter-gatherer instincts, not from culture.

Embodied Visions is a pathbreaking explanation of how films are crafted to activate innate features of our brains and bodies. The book is based on cutting edge neuropsychology and evolutionary...

Embodied Visions

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The secular artwork was invented in painted domestic rooms between roughly 1300 and 1450, alongside Trecento arguments about vernacular poetry.

A reader might be surprised to find a full-page picture of a mechanical rooster toward the beginning of Painted Palaces. The bird is more than three feet tall, and it...

Painted Palaces

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The secular artwork was invented in painted domestic rooms between roughly 1300 and 1450, alongside Trecento arguments about vernacular poetry.

There wasn’t one moment when the book started to take shape in my mind, but I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, since I was a student. If you...

Painted Palaces

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Secular art began in painted domestic rooms around 1300, much earlier than assumed.

Painted Palaces is essentially an argument against a tenacious idea in art history – that one day around 1500, artists woke up, threw off the oppression of religion, and invented...

Painted Palaces

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American control of the development banks comes from America's lack of wholehearted support for them, not its shareholding.

One of my favorite sections in the book is about how the Reagan administration disciplined the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in the 1980s. The IDB was founded in 1959 to provide...

Behind the Development Banks

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American control of the development banks comes from America's lack of wholehearted support for them, not its shareholding.

The banks’ governing structure mirrors that of private corporations, with voting on their boards weighted by capital contribution. This gives wealthy countries influence out of proportion to their share of...

Behind the Development Banks

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America controls the development banks through its lack of wholehearted support, not its shareholding.

This book is about how American politics affects the multilateral development banks—or “the banks,” for short. The best known of these is the World Bank, but several regional banks that...

Behind the Development Banks

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Keystone's significance lies in slapstick's passage from working-class culture to the centre of an emergent mass culture.

It can admittedly be difficult to sense this kind of “sociology” of comedy – in large part because of our nostalgic fixation on images of custard pies and Keystone cops....

The Fun Factory

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Keystone's history traces slapstick's passage from working-class culture to the center of mass culture.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson famously described laughter as a “social gesture.” It’s a quote that has been a watchword in my own thinking about comedy. Why people laugh, who...

The Fun Factory

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Keystone's significance lies in slapstick's passage from working-class culture to the centre of an emergent mass culture.

The Keystone Film Company is one of those film studios whose name immediately conjures up a host of associations. Founded in 1912 by Irish-Canadian Mack Sennett, Keystone was the studio...

The Fun Factory

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The tropics are an invention of the temperate zone, and the pineapple's circuit falsifies the ranking they carry.

Tropical products, including sugar and fruits, were systematically planted in the tropics and harvested and conveyed to the temperate zone, along with Indian and later African and Asian specimens and...

Pineapple Culture

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The tropics are an invention of the temperate zone, not a natural division.

Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...

Pineapple Culture

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The tropics are an invention of the temperate zone, and the pineapple's circuit falsifies the ranking they carry.

Plucked from tropical America, the pineapple was brought to European tables and hothouses before it was conveyed back to the tropics, where it came to dominate U.S. and world markets....

Pineapple Culture

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Tarzan's hold comes from serving competing desires at once, not from a stable meaning.

Most likely someone flipping through On Tarzan at a bookstore will first notice the photographs introducing each chapter and the epigraphs. I hope this potential reader sees the humor here.There’s...

On Tarzan

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Tarzan's hold is a function of paradox, since the figure's power comes from serving competing desires at once.

One potential audience for On Tarzan is the American Studies classroom. Undergraduate scholars might enjoy the early discussion of the “juvenile” nature of the Tarzan narratives, the post-Darwin idea of...

On Tarzan

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Tarzan's hold is a function of paradox, since the figure's power comes from serving competing desires at once.

On Tarzan is the only book-length study of this pop culture icon. Historically, the book moves from the momentum of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first. It aspires to...

On Tarzan

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Fifty years of slumming produced the white/black racial axis and the hetero/homo binary in reciprocal relation to each other.

Although I hesitated to put a Harlem image on the cover of Slumming, precisely because I wanted to challenge the almost exclusive association of that neighborhood with my book’s topic,...

Slumming

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Primates got their vision as prey, because constricting snakes were their first predators and selected for forward-facing eyes.

I’m intrigued about the implications of the Snake Detection theory for human behavior, and, in the epilogue, I write most directly about humans. Have you ever wondered about our ability to...

The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent

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Primates got their sharp vision as prey of snakes, not as predators.

The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...

The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent

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Primates got their vision as prey, because constricting snakes were their first predators and selected for forward-facing eyes.

The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent is the result of my attempt to understand what in the environments of proto-primates might have begun the process of brain modification to...

The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent

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Fifty years of slumming helped produce America's black/white and gay/straight divides together.

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have begun to investigate the social construction of race and sexuality in the United States. Noting the absence of any fixed biological or...

Slumming

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Fifty years of slumming produced the white/black racial axis and the hetero/homo binary in reciprocal relation to each other.

The word slumming, with all its problematic connotations, likely calls to mind the late-night excursions of white pleasure seekers to the cabarets of Prohibition-era Harlem. But the practice of slumming...

Slumming

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Soviet middle echelons finally demanded the car as their share of the empire's wealth, and they got it.

The spatial requirements and landscape consequences of the automobile age – the roads, oil and gas refineries and stations, garages, tire and parts stores and junk yards, billboards and flashing...

Cars for Comrades

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Soviet middle echelons finally demanded the car as their share of the empire's wealth, and they got it.

No contextual landscape for the book existed in the sense of a previous body of historical scholarship devoted to the subject. The Soviet automobile did figure in Cold War-era economists’...

Cars for Comrades

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Soviet car culture was durable enough to outlive the USSR.

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens....

Cars for Comrades

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Partisanship is the morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy, and the Independent's real deficit is weightlessness.

I’ll focus on the three elements of my proposed ethic of partisanship, which applies to “civilian” partisans, ordinary citizen voters, as well as to partisan politicians in office.The first is...

On the Side of the Angels

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Partisanship is the morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy, and the Independent's real deficit is weightlessness.

Three things drew me to this project. In my earlier work on freedom of association in the U.S., Membership and Morals, I attended to virtually every sort of voluntary association...

On the Side of the Angels

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Partisanship is not a regrettable necessity but the moral heart of representative democracy.

Distaste of parties and partisanship is palpable and widespread. While party activists battle one another each claiming they are on side of the angels, critics demonize them all and praise...

On the Side of the Angels

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The sexual divide gets its power from the body, sexuality and procreation, so the word is sex, not gender.

The volatility and possibility of recent gender history makes Chapter Seven especially interesting to general readers. “Where Does Sex Divide: Feminism, Sexuality and the Structures of Gender since 1960” starts...

Mysteries of Sex

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The sexual divide gets its power from the body, sexuality and procreation, so the word is sex, not gender.

I wrote my first book, Womanhood in America, almost 40 years ago. It was an audacious enterprise, an attempt to write the history of half the population at a time...

Mysteries of Sex

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The male-female divide draws its power from the body, which is why it is sex, not gender.

Mysteries of Sex invites the reader to suspend the belief that men are men and women are women and explore two intertwined phenomena. The book asks first of all just...

Mysteries of Sex

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Pakistan's decline comes not from Islam but from its unresolved relation to Islam as a political ideology.

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...

Making Sense of Pakistan

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Pakistan's decline comes not from Islam but from its unresolved relation to Islam as a political ideology.

The toughest part of any writing on Pakistan is the challenge of how to address the key question of Islam in the construction of Pakistan’s identity. The risk here is...

Making Sense of Pakistan

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Pakistan's decline comes not from Islam but from its unresolved relation to Islam as politics.

The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis. This crisis, I argue, is rooted...

Making Sense of Pakistan

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What Goethe and Schiller most feared in dilettantism was porousness, the collapse of the divide between genius and average.

Were a browsing reader to open my book at random, he or she could do worse than opening up to the third chapter, which deals with the average artist. Here...

Exemplarity and Mediocrity

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Since the eighteenth century art takes the common man as subject but bars him as artist.

Were a browsing reader to open my book at random, he or she could do worse than opening up to the third chapter, which deals with the average artist. Here...

Exemplarity and Mediocrity

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What Goethe and Schiller most feared in dilettantism was porousness, the collapse of the divide between genius and average.

My book explores various conflicts surrounding the terms “mediocre,” “common,” “ordinary,” and “non-exceptional” in literary and aesthetic discourse since the eighteenth century, when the average man, the market place, and...

Exemplarity and Mediocrity

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Supreme Court appointments should judge nominees' values, not their credentials.

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

The Next Justice

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Supreme Court appointments are political by design, and the right politics weighs nominees' values rather than their credentials.

Like many law professors, I began my career by doing two judicial clerkships—basically, serving as a staff lawyer for a federal judge. I spent one year in the chambers of...

The Next Justice

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Supreme Court appointments are political by design, and the right politics weighs nominees' values rather than their credentials.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s “composure remained intact and her confirmation to the Supreme Court seemed on track,” reported the New York Times on July 15. No summary better captures the bizarre...

The Next Justice

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New York's historic preservation dates to the 1890s and the same city builders who produced skyscrapers and subways.

These two “close-ups” might compel readers: The first is the book’s collection of images. The portfolio, chapter images and the book’s cover capture the extraordinary moment in New York’s history in...

The Once and Future New York

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Historic preservation in New York began in the 1890s, not as a 1960s reaction against Modernism.

We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...

The Once and Future New York

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New York's historic preservation dates to the 1890s and the same city builders who produced skyscrapers and subways.

The Once and Future New York is a history of historic preservation’s appearance as a kind of urban reform, design and planning in early 20th-century New York. The book...

The Once and Future New York

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There is no balance of nature, not now and not at any point in Earth's history.

Of my various publications, this is the work that is most meaningful to me; the book is my synthesis of what I believe ecology to be, and why it is...

The Balance of Nature

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There is no balance of nature, not now and not at any point in Earth's history.

I actually began thinking about this book about two decades ago. I teach at a liberal arts college and I have had numerous fruitful interactions ranging from casual conversations with...

The Balance of Nature

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There is no balance of nature, not now and not at any point in Earth's history.

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...

The Balance of Nature

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German left and right protest movements grew by the same dynamics, bold actions, elite alliances and mistakes by police.

When a large, influential protest movement occurs, I have found that it is the result of a remarkable confluence of factors, including mutually reinforcing actions by different actors. In the southwestern...

Protest Politics in Germany

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German left and right protest movements grew by the same dynamics, bold actions, elite alliances and mistakes by police.

In Germany, protest politics takes place within the context of a stable democratic system. Democracy provides for voting, lobbying, and other routine methods for citizens to try to influence government....

Protest Politics in Germany

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Protest movements grow through clashes with allies and police, not because of the group's nature.

Protest Politics in Germany is about the interactions between protest groups, their allies, and their opponents. The settings are conflicts that have dominated German politics in the last quarter of...

Protest Politics in Germany

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The lie detector has survived eighty years of scientific refutation because it was never science.

For Keeler’s placebo strategy to succeed—both for him to sell his services and to make the lie detector effective—he had to drum up publicity. Hence, my book zooms in on...

The Lie Detectors

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The lie detector has survived eighty years of scientific refutation because it was never science.

I am a historian of science, but rather than focus on the achievements of great thinkers—Darwin’s theory of natural selection, say, or Einstein’s theory of relativity—I am interested in the...

The Lie Detectors

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The lie detector has survived eighty years of scientific refutation because it was never science.

I did not write this book to “debunk” the lie detector. Eminent psychologists have been trying to do that for eighty years, ever since interrogators first re-purposed some basic physiological...

The Lie Detectors

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At every major turning point in Soviet history there was a real alternative, an actual leader who was defeated.

On page 116 I pose the question: How is the historic end of the Soviet Union to be explained? This is a question discussed in most American high schools and...

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives

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At every major turning point in Soviet history there was a real alternative, an actual leader who was defeated.

Most historians and journalists in the United States say that what happened in the Soviet Union was a straight line of inevitable development, from the moment the Communists took power...

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives

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At every turning point in Soviet history there was a real alternative that was defeated.

I begin with the fact that, along with the United States, no country was more important in the twentieth century than was the Soviet Union. And it may also be...

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives

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Pseudo-history is a product of modern mass society, built from the obsolete and discredited scholarship of earlier eras.

There is a section in the book that many readers might find particularly amusing, on the relation between occultism and spiritualism concerning Atlantis. One of the primary characters involved here...

Invented Knowledge

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Pseudo-history is not ancient but a product of modern mass society.

I first became interested in pseudo-history during the late 1980s when I was a faculty member at Lamar University. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas...

Invented Knowledge

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Pseudo-history is a product of modern mass society, built from the obsolete and discredited scholarship of earlier eras.

Invented Knowledge is about various strange and false beliefs that have been held and still are held about the human past; the book tells how several strains of pseudo-historical and...

Invented Knowledge

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Cuban filmmakers used cheap digital tools and foreign financing to reshape national identity rather than lose it.

On Location shares the voices and visions of dozens of Cuban filmmakers. With candor they explain their interest in probing subjects once considered taboo in Cuba—sexuality, domestic violence, drugs, prostitution,...

On Location in Cuba

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Cuban filmmakers used global tools to reshape national identity rather than lose it.

In Cuba, the prominence of culture and its centrality to political and economic forces can surprise those unfamiliar with it. I recall one consulting trip early in this century, when...

On Location in Cuba

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Cuban filmmakers used cheap digital tools and foreign financing to reshape national identity rather than lose it.

Cuba has undergone dramatic changes during the past two decades. As global tides washed over the island in the early 1990s, Cubans did their best to remain anchored. How did...

On Location in Cuba

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Third Republic republicans treated music as a public utility, and it did real democratic work in the concert hall.

The book can be read like parts of a puzzle. Although some themes (education, history, progress, and national identity) permeate the entire book, one can start anywhere depending on one’s...

Composing the Citizen

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Third Republic republicans treated music as a public utility, and it did real democratic work in the concert hall.

As a pianist who loved to perform the music of Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré, and as a modernist who studied Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, I grew up inspired by their...

Composing the Citizen

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In the French Third Republic, music was a public utility that did real democratic work.

Composing the Citizen explores how and why music is deeply valuable to society, how music helps people fulfill their human potential as individuals and members of communities. The Third Republic in...

Composing the Citizen

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Underinvestment in higher education, not trade, is why middle-class real earnings have been flat or falling since 1980.

Chapter 5 adopts a rigorous definition of what externalities are, identifies a wide range of external social benefits of higher education, presents and evaluates the empirical evidence for each, and...

Higher Learning, Greater Good

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Underinvestment in higher education, not trade, is why middle-class real earnings have been flat or falling since 1980.

64% of the US population — which includes the middle class — has a high school education or less, a pattern also found in the UK and EU countries. This...

Higher Learning, Greater Good

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Most of the return on higher education is invisible to the usual accounting.

Higher Learning, Greater Good is the first book to systematically identify and develop the evidence necessary to measure comprehensively the benefits of higher education and to estimate their economic value. The...

Higher Learning, Greater Good

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Carter, thwarted in the short run, permanently installed human rights on the national agenda.

Selecting one particular close-up is hard: I’m trying to make the argument that all the different elements of Carter’s treatment of human rights were important. If just one thing had...

Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda

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Presidential influence has to be judged over decades, not terms.

Scholars of the presidency argue about whether what the president says matters. We wonder if anyone is listening; if they are, whether the president has the ability to persuade them;...

Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda

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Carter, thwarted in the short run, permanently installed human rights on the national agenda.

There is a strong belief in the media and among scholars that the best way to lead is by focusing clearly and consistently on one idea at a time. That...

Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda

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