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Cocaine was a legal Andean export until the 1940s, and US Cold War politics made it a criminal trade.

I use a number of lenses on cocaine’s history, but one revealing close-up concerns the actual “technology” of cocaine making. Usually, the history of cocaine departs from the heroics of modern...

Andean Cocaine

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Cocaine was a legal Andean export until the 1940s, and US Cold War politics made it a criminal trade.

I like to think of Andean Cocaine as a hidden chapter in the history of globalization. Today, cocaine, as part of a colossal global criminal enterprise, is the most valuable...

Andean Cocaine

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Cocaine was made illegal by politics, not by pharmacology.

Andean Cocaine is cocaine’s first full-length biography. The book is, I hope, a more “serious” than usual history of the infamous drug, covering more than a century from cocaine’s birth...

Andean Cocaine

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The subprime collapse was made by policy, deregulation since the early 1980s and capital markets wired directly to homeowners.

Historical breadth will hopefully make Foreclosed particularly useful beyond the near term. But the timing of the book is not coincidental. I have a proximate objective of using lessons from...

Foreclosed

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The subprime collapse was made by policy, deregulation since the early 1980s and capital markets wired directly to homeowners.

Unlike many books on the mortgage and financial crises in the trade press, Foreclosed focuses much more on the damage that high-risk lending markets imposed on neighborhoods and communities. I...

Foreclosed

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The subprime collapse was made by policy, not by an unforeseeable bubble.

Foreclosed describes the evolution of U.S. mortgage markets from the early twentieth century through to the subprime crisis of the late 2000s. The book details the highly mixed-economy nature of...

Foreclosed

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Cheney was a co-president, and the mechanism was staffing, loyalists placed across the administration so every memo reached him.

In the past month or so, we have seen former Vice President Cheney aggressively respond to charges by President Obama that the Bush administration exacerbated America’s friends and foes with...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney

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Cheney was a co-president, and the mechanism was staffing, loyalists placed across the administration so every memo reached him.

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney opens a new door into understanding the dynamics between the president’s office and the vice president’s office. Material for the book was gathered over...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney

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Dick Cheney was a co-president, not a foreign-policy vice president.

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney explores the extraordinary depth of Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration – and how Cheney built that influence. Cheney’s role was so pervasive in policy...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney

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Passions and desires are what generate an impartial standpoint on justice, and passionless reason cannot decide at all.

People are often skeptical about the possibility of impartial deliberation. Yet while the demands of impartial deliberation are high, they are demands that we can satisfy, at least so long...

Civil Passions

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Passions and desires are what generate an impartial standpoint on justice, and passionless reason cannot decide at all.

As citizens, our relationship to the laws shouldn’t be one of blind obedience; it should reflect critical engagement and sound judgment. In fact, we have a political obligation as democratic...

Civil Passions

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Impartiality does not require the absence of passion.

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

Civil Passions

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Eakins, dead in 1916, could not have perceived human difference the way a modern anthropologist does.

I would like to highlight the subsections on “Indian Portraits” and “Zuni Perspectives,” in Chapter 3 (pages 191-212 in the book). On those pages, I discuss a remarkable 1895 portrait...

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

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Eakins, dead in 1916, could not have perceived human difference the way a modern anthropologist does.

I was born in 1961 and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, the youngest of three children. My father was an English professor from New Jersey and my mother, a homemaker...

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

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Thomas Eakins pictured human difference through a pre-modern view that confused race with behavior.

My book is about a historic change that occurred a century ago in the way people view human differences, illustrated through the work and life of a major artist. Today,...

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity

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Peruvian corruption is structural and measurable, consuming as much as 30 to 40 percent of public budgets over 250 years.

Description of the personal efforts of distinguished past foes of corruption is a leitmotiv set up in pages 21-25 and repeated in the opening sections of each subsequent chapter.The first...

Corrupt Circles

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Peruvian corruption is structural and measurable, consuming as much as 30 to 40 percent of public budgets over 250 years.

Corrupt Circles combines different tools of economic, political, and historical analysis to identify the costs and consequences of corruption in a developing society. The book particularly adopts and applies recent...

Corrupt Circles

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Corruption in Peru has been structural for 250 years, not episodic.

Corruption has existed since the earliest civilizations but documenting and writing its history has not been easy. In the case of Peru, tackling through detailed research the challenges to writing...

Corrupt Circles

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The through line of Depression-era American culture was a sustained turn to the past, not radicalism.

Many browsing readers – this is certainly true for me – would take a look at a book’s introduction. Here, the introduction gives a relatively full explanation of what I...

The American 1930s

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The through line of Depression-era American culture was a sustained turn to the past, not radicalism.

In all of my books, my chief purpose is to examine the ways in which history and imaginative works can illuminate each other. How do the events of a particular...

The American 1930s

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Depression-era American culture turned to the past more than to radicalism.

With the exception only of the Civil War, Americans faced in the Depression of the 1930s the most wrenching and divisive domestic crisis in their history. An economic structure that...

The American 1930s

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Making a good comic about Latinos is a matter of responsibility to the story rather than blood quantum.

Your Brain on Latino Comics provides readers with an understanding of how comic books in general work to move us and to engage our critical faculties and imagination. It also...

Your Brain on Latino Comics

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Making a good comic about Latinos is a matter of responsibility to the story rather than blood quantum.

Part of developing our taste for certain comic books—and the same applies for novels, music, art, films, and the like—is our refining of our aesthetic sensibility. This typically happens at...

Your Brain on Latino Comics

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A good comic about Latinos depends on responsibility to the story, not blood quantum.

The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating...

Your Brain on Latino Comics

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California's stakes abroad are already a nation's, and Californians should pursue them directly rather than leave them to Washington.

Global California should be of interest to national, state and local government officials, corporate and trade union executives, officers and active members of non-governmental organizations, civic and religious leaders, the...

Global California

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California's international stakes are already those of a nation.

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

Global California

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California's stakes abroad are already a nation's, and Californians should pursue them directly rather than leave them to Washington.

Global California addresses how the citizens of a megastate with the dimensions and power of a nation are affected by international trends and challenges, and what they can do, within...

Global California

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China between 1900 and 1949 was more open and more accountable than China is today.

Some readers may think that the first chapter on participatory politics and legal reform is the key, as these laid the foundation for an open and civil society in China....

The Age of Openness

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China from 1900 to 1949 was the most open period in its modern history.

During the recent Olympic Games a common cliché was to talk about China’s “coming out party,” meaning that China was finally opening out to the world. The key point of...

The Age of Openness

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China between 1900 and 1949 was more open and more accountable than China is today.

The era between empire and communism is routinely portrayed as a catastrophic interlude in China’s modern history. The Age of Openness argues instead that the first half of the twentieth...

The Age of Openness

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Mathematics lives in the mind like Macbeth's dagger, and mathematicians make and judge it by aesthetic standards.

Mathematics in Ten Lessons is intended for an audience of humanists, where humanist is interpreted in the wide sense to mean anyone in the humanities. But, because of the way...

Mathematics in 10 Lessons

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Mathematics lives in the mind like Macbeth's dagger, and mathematicians make and judge it by aesthetic standards.

Galileo told us many years ago that, if you want to understand nature, you must read her book. And the book of nature, Galileo said, is written in mathematics. Without...

Mathematics in 10 Lessons

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Mathematics is created, not discovered.

Mathematicians know two things that others do not. They know first that all mathematics flows from a few fundamental principles. Second, they know that aesthetic considerations provide both the motivation...

Mathematics in 10 Lessons

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The American trial is dying from the bureaucratic and market structures around it, and that death is not inevitable.

The second chapter of the book provides a broad historical account of the importance of the Anglo-American trial and the fierceness with which the Founding Fathers defended it. The story...

The Death of the American Trial

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The American trial is dying from the bureaucratic and market structures around it, and that death is not inevitable.

I have practiced law for thirty-five years. I am continually moved by the power and depth of the understanding of human situations that the trial provides. This book is an...

The Death of the American Trial

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The American trial is dying from the bureaucracy and markets around it, not its own flaws.

Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...

The Death of the American Trial

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Helen Gurley Brown belongs in the pantheon of second-wave feminists.

Rorotoko’s readers may find Helen Gurley Brown’s attempts to “queer up” her publications interesting. As time went on, Brown learned that equating sex with heterosexuality sold magazines and paid her...

Bad Girls Go Everywhere

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Helen Gurley Brown belongs in the pantheon of second-wave feminists.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a biography and a cultural history. It charts a woman’s life through several significant eras in American history: the deprivations of the Great Depression, the...

Bad Girls Go Everywhere

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Helen Gurley Brown belongs in the pantheon of second-wave feminists.

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

Bad Girls Go Everywhere

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A human being really could become Batman, but cumulative concussions would soon end the career.

Chapter 13 is entitled “Injury and Recovery: How Much Banging until the Batback Goes Bonk?” When thinking of Batman, people tend to often think of his gear and technology, often...

Becoming Batman

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A human being really could become Batman, but cumulative concussions would soon end the career.

The main concept under the surface of Becoming Batman is that of stress and adaptation. All responses of the body to exercise, training, and skill learning involve the principle that...

Becoming Batman

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A human being really could become Batman, but not stay Batman for long.

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

Becoming Batman

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Every famine is the product of economic backwardness and human action together.

The book ranges from describing the horrors of famine in some detail to musing, with tempered hope, about the prospects of eliminating famine, at least in peacetime. I would hope...

Famine

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Every famine is the product of economic backwardness and human action together.

I am an economic historian whose academic training was in economics. For over two decades, I have been writing books and articles in the professional academic journals about the Great...

Famine

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Every famine is the product of economic backwardness and human action together.

The book is about famine, one of the greatest catastrophes that could befall any community. It offers a clear, non-technical overview of a fraught topic and of a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary...

Famine

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Innovation generates uncertainty that past data cannot turn into measurable risk, and the banks were making exactly that conversion.

Chapter eight, ‘Imagination and creativity in markets’, begins by analysing the nature of imagination and its relationship to reason. Imagination receives strangely little attention in most of modern academia in...

The Romantic Economist

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Innovation creates uncertainty that past data cannot turn into measurable risk.

The Romantics understood what scientists often forget: that, as Wordsworth put it, we ‘half-create’ the world we see. Any particular observation is the joint product of sense data our minds...

The Romantic Economist

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Innovation generates uncertainty that past data cannot turn into measurable risk, and the banks were making exactly that conversion.

My starting point for The Romantic Economist was an observation made during seventeen years working in the world of finance. I was struck by an important mismatch between the way...

The Romantic Economist

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Reason and language are irrelevant to moral status, so killing and eating animals is unjustifiable.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “in all essential respects, the animal is absolutely identical with us… The difference lies merely in the accident, the intellect, not in the...

Animals and the Moral Community

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Reason and language are irrelevant to moral status, so killing and eating animals is unjustifiable.

Animals and the Moral Community is divided into two parts. In the first, I examine historical and contemporary debates surrounding the question of the mental capacities of animals. In the...

Animals and the Moral Community

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Reason and language are irrelevant to moral status.

More than fifty-three billion animals are killed worldwide for human consumption every year, and yet we give little thought to the inner subjective lives of animals and the remarkable extent...

Animals and the Moral Community

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New York's tower-block public housing worked, carried by constant maintenance, tough policing, tenant selection and community planning.

Anybody interested in social policy should take a look at Chapters 11 and 12 in the book. These chapters show that New York’s housing managers faced and overcame many of...

Public Housing That Worked

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New York's tower-block public housing worked, carried by constant maintenance, tough policing, tenant selection and community planning.

The fields of design and urban history are dominated by public housing enmity. Public housing projects are key proofs, for instance, in the theory that design determines social behavior. When...

Public Housing That Worked

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New York's tower-block public housing worked, proving that design does not determine social outcome.

Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago...

Public Housing That Worked

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Twelfth-century Europe had no government, only lordship.

In Chapter VI, on pages 484-499, I open the discussion of “politicised power” with a new reading of the notorious assassination of Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170. Here, one...

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century

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Twelfth-century Europe had no government, only lordship.

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century was conceived in 1987 when, upon moving from Berkeley to Harvard, I was invited to offer a course in Harvard’s undergraduate core curriculum. I...

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century

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Twelfth-century Europe had no government, only lordship.

This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No,...

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century

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The LHC matters because its energy range is genuinely terra incognita, and nobody knows what is there.

While The Quantum Frontier is not a single-topic book, perhaps no question has received as much attention as that of the enigmatic Higgs boson. This undiscovered particle is always mentioned...

The Quantum Frontier

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The LHC matters because nobody knows what lies in its energy range.

We have come to understand that all the matter we have ever observed is made of a scant hundred chemical elements. The past century has shown that the atomic elements...

The Quantum Frontier

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The LHC matters because its energy range is genuinely terra incognita, and nobody knows what is there.

In the fall of 2008, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, began operations for the first time. Circulating beams of protons under the Swiss and...

The Quantum Frontier

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Iraq's antiquities were pillaged for structural reasons, and most of the people involved acted in good faith.

One of the most poignant moments in The Rape of Mesopotamia comes when John Limbert, a diplomat and former Iranian hostage, was ordered to Baghdad by Colin Powell in the...

The Rape of Mesopotamia

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Iraq's antiquities were pillaged for structural reasons, and most of the people involved acted in good faith.

It is a pretty twisted professional path that leads a cultural critic like me to become an expert on the history of the Army’s Civil Affairs division, fluent in the...

The Rape of Mesopotamia

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Iraq's antiquities were looted for structural reasons, not from incompetence or indifference.

The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....

The Rape of Mesopotamia

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Early modern globalization was made by individuals who could see only part of what they were doing.

The nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...

Global Lives

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West Africans controlled the terms of early modern trade on their own coast, including the trade in enslaved people.

After a number of years researching, writing and teaching on global history (and what I call global historical geography) I was struck with two things. First, the unappealing nature of...

Global Lives

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West Africans controlled the terms of early modern trade on their own coast, including the trade in enslaved people.

Global Lives aims to offer an introduction to global history between 1550 and 1800. Focusing on Britain’s changing relationships with the rest of the world, it sets out the contours...

Global Lives

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The Greeks had no notion of amateurism, so today's cash-bonus Olympics are closer to the ancient games than Coubertin's were.

My ideal reader would begin reading at the end of the book. (Maybe I ought to have written it in Hebrew.) The final chapter explores the ways the modern Olympic...

Greek Sport and Social Status

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The Greeks had no notion of amateurism in sport.

My earliest publications, on childhood in ancient Greece, grew out of my involvement with the movement to force the University of Toronto to provide day-care for the children of its...

Greek Sport and Social Status

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The Greeks had no notion of amateurism, so today's cash-bonus Olympics are closer to the ancient games than Coubertin's were.

My book examines how Greek sport, the Olympics above all, has been used to attain and affirm social status from ancient times until today. This involves more than simply coveting...

Greek Sport and Social Status

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Hagenbeck's Tierpark was a colossal outdoor panorama, and themed space began there, not with Disneyland.

One aspect of the book will be of particular interest to American readers: the history of Wild West shows in Germany. The story of Buffalo Bill, his Wild West, and...

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments

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Hagenbeck's Tierpark was a colossal outdoor panorama, and themed space began there, not with Disneyland.

Although it focuses on a single figure, the book casts a wide net to cover many different forms of entertainment: zoos, circuses, panoramas, silent films, ethnographic villages, amusement parks, and...

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments

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Themed space began with Hagenbeck's animal park, not with Disneyland.

This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments

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Independent truckers built, from the 1930s onward, the low-wage non-union distribution system that made the Wal-Mart economy possible.

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

Trucking Country

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Independent truckers built, from the 1930s onward, the low-wage non-union distribution system that made the Wal-Mart economy possible.

I began research on this project not so much because I was fascinated with truckers, trucking culture, or big rigs, but because I wanted to understand how transformations in rural...

Trucking Country

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Independent truckers built the low-wage distribution system that made the Wal-Mart economy possible.

Trucking Country shows how the social history of long-haul truckers was enmeshed with the political history of America’s transition from the New Deal era to the conservative counter-revolution of the...

Trucking Country

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A Christian Europe is historical amnesia, since Muslim and Christian soldiers fought in the same armies for eight centuries.

I suppose if I wanted any single moment of the book to be read by the random reader, it would be a particular battle, the battle of Cortenuova in the...

Two Faiths, One Banner

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A Christian Europe is historical amnesia, since Muslim and Christian soldiers fought in the same armies for eight centuries.

At the moment, we Europeans live in a “Fortress Europe.” We’re convinced that our continent – which is really nothing more than the westernmost ridge of Eurasia, and Britain nothing...

Two Faiths, One Banner

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A Christian Europe is historical amnesia.

In many ways, Two Faiths, One Banner reveals how the history of Islam and the history of Europe are profoundly intertwined. In an age obsessed with Muslim-Christian so-called civilizational conflict,...

Two Faiths, One Banner

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Philip deserves the epithet Great, and Alexander, who wrecked his father's project, does not.

By taking into account recent archaeological discoveries and reinterpreting ancient literary sources, I tell Philip’s story in my book, and I reassess the impact of his reign. In doing so,...

Philip II of Macedonia

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Philip, not his son Alexander, deserves to be called the Great.

Philip II of Macedonia did not conquer on the scale Alexander did. And so Philip is not the household name that Alexander is. But Philip changed the course of Greek...

Philip II of Macedonia

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Philip deserves the epithet Great, and Alexander, who wrecked his father's project, does not.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia is one of the most exciting and controversial figures of antiquity. Probably only Jesus Christ is more famous from the ancient world. Alexander was only...

Philip II of Macedonia

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Young Israeli writers' turn to romantic escapism after the late 1980s was passive resistance, a political stance in itself.

Chapter 2, titled “Popular Media in a Post National Age” (pages 31-63 in the book) would be most readily accessible and intriguing for readers who know little about modern Israeli...

Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas

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Young Israeli writers' turn to romantic escapism after the late 1980s was passive resistance, a political stance in itself.

The book relates primarily to theories and practices of postmodernism and globalization, two of the most central intellectual trends of the last few decades. The book shows how the arrival...

Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas

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Young Israeli writers' retreat into romance after the late 1980s was itself a political stance.

The book examines Israeli culture in the 1990s between the two popular Palestinian uprisings, the intifadas, in 1987 and 2000, respectively. By looking at popular media and literature, I highlight...

Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas

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Refrigeration broke the link between food quality and time, season and place, which is why it was bitterly opposed.

The chapter on eggs shows how and why refrigeration used to be controversial, which these days many people will find hard to imagine. It also contains a good story about...

Fresh

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Refrigeration broke the link between food quality and time, season and place.

Beneath the stories of individual foods lies a larger story about the ambivalent appetites borne of life in a modern industrial society. This is less abstract than it sounds. As...

Fresh

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Refrigeration broke the link between food quality and time, season and place, which is why it was bitterly opposed.

I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to online advertising, but in recent weeks one ad has been hard to miss. When I check the weather page in the morning, out...

Fresh

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Foreign audiences rejected US Cold War propaganda wherever American conduct contradicted it, forcing USIA to rethink what American meant.

Start with the introduction to see how and why I situate the early Cold War propaganda campaigns into a post-9/11 context. I think anyone who has noted contemporary discussions about...

Selling the American Way

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Foreign audiences rejected US Cold War propaganda wherever American conduct contradicted it, forcing USIA to rethink what American meant.

I began researching Selling the American Way in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was very interested in determining how foreign audiences understood the United...

Selling the American Way

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No propaganda survives a country contradicting its own values.

Selling the American Way is about the ways that the U.S. government defined and disseminated official narratives about American society, politics, and culture during the early Cold War. Using radio...

Selling the American Way

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What Americans feel about weather is taught to them by institutions that claim authority to speak on it.

I hope Weather Matters is a book that can be opened to any of its many subheadings and engage the reader. The chapters are topical more than chronological, and my...

Weather Matters

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What Americans feel about weather is taught to them by institutions.

Weather Matters is a history of all these phenomena. It explores the questions why and how we talk about the weather in science, the media, popular culture, and the arts....

Weather Matters

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What Americans feel about weather is taught to them by institutions that claim authority to speak on it.

Weather, as defined by meteorologists, is the state of the atmosphere as it affects life over a period of a few minutes, or at most a few days. This distinguishes...

Weather Matters

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The Gulf Stream is wilderness in the same sense as Niagara or the Grand Canyon.

I wrote The Gulf Stream for the science and history enthusiasts as much as for those wishing an introduction to one of the last vestiges of wilderness on Earth.In pages...

The Gulf Stream

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The Gulf Stream is wilderness in the same sense as Niagara or the Grand Canyon.

I approach the Gulf Stream as a nexus that links many strands from both the scientific and cultural worlds. While plenty of mysteries remain about the Gulf Stream, much more of its...

The Gulf Stream

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The Gulf Stream is not just an ocean current but a system binding physics, biology and history.

The book explores the fascinating story of the Gulf Stream, a powerful Atlantic Ocean current with a force 300 times that of the mighty Amazon. During Europe’s dominance in the...

The Gulf Stream

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Orientalism was canonized without being read through, and Said's own thesis is itself an essentialism.

It is sometimes said that you cannot judge a book by its cover. But this should not prevent the reader of Orientalism from reading into its cover illustration. This is...

Reading Orientalism

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Said's Orientalism was canonized without being read through.

Said’s Orientalism, reviewed in over forty journals at the time of its publication, has left a wide range of criticism in its wake. Positioning himself as a literary David slinging...

Reading Orientalism

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Orientalism was canonized without being read through, and Said's own thesis is itself an essentialism.

Reading Orientalism is literally a re-reading of the late Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s powerful critique remains a milestone in the critical theory of academic bias three decades after its first...

Reading Orientalism

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The Cuban Revolution survived on loyalty generated by cubanía, the belief in an independent and socially just Cuba.

I would recommend a prospective reader to start with the final chapter, on Fidel. The rest of the book tends to ignore him. Deliberately. I have always resisted the tendency...

Cuba in Revolution

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