All the threads

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

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

Cuba in Revolution

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The Cuban Revolution survived on loyalty rooted in belief in an independent, just Cuba.

Essentially this book was written in an attempt to explain to the interested lay reader why a curious phenomenon still called 'the Cuban Revolution' had managed to survive for so...

Cuba in Revolution

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Population growth ends when women decide the timing of their own births, without stopping anyone from having children.

I like a book that tells you what it’s about on the very first page. Mine does—in fact on a page numbered with a roman numeral. Open it up to...

More

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Population growth ends when women decide the timing of their own births, without stopping anyone from having children.

People have wrestled with population and the control of reproduction for thousands of years. Yet both of these topics are always sensitive and hence mostly marginalized in literature and public...

More

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Population growth ends when women decide the timing of their own births.

More offers a new narrative of the human story that highlights the importance of intentional reproduction—wanting a child, and then having one—in the evolution of civilization and in light of...

More

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Scholastic wrangling over whether indivisible angels can move is what made irrational numbers and actual infinities acceptable.

Due to the historical scope of this book there are several themes that weave through the entire narration. Take, for example, the attempts of various writers to understand the concept...

What is a Number? Mathematical Concepts and Their Origins

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Scholastic wrangling over whether indivisible angels can move is what made irrational numbers and actual infinities acceptable.

It is well known that mathematical ideas and techniques have long dominated the physical sciences. And in the twentieth century social and biological scientists began to mathematize their disciplines. But...

What is a Number? Mathematical Concepts and Their Origins

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Mathematical concepts have shaped humanistic argument for two and a half millennia.

I find that non-mathematicians often perceive mathematics as a self-contained, inaccessible, body of knowledge that was essentially completed sometime in the distant past. Mathematics is seen as being isolated from...

What is a Number? Mathematical Concepts and Their Origins

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Modern art became a political problem in Los Angeles because the city's boosters and art patrons were the same people.

I encourage readers to explore the many art controversies explored in Art and the City as windows onto the urban landscape at specific historical moments. The chapter on the Watts...

Art and the City

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Modern art threatened Los Angeles because the city's boosters and art patrons were the same people.

My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...

Art and the City

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Modern art became a political problem in Los Angeles because the city's boosters and art patrons were the same people.

My book argues that in twentieth century Los Angeles, a city famous for promoting movies and celebrities and a leisurely lifestyle, public art with its ambiguous meanings and controversial forms...

Art and the City

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The Internet, a control technology, passed as a medium of freedom because freedom and control had been coupled.

This book focuses not only on questions of sexuality, but also race. Race, Control and Freedom argues, was, and still is, central to conceiving “cyberspace” as a utopian commercial space....

Control and Freedom

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The Internet, a control technology, passed as a medium of freedom because freedom and control had been coupled.

During the Afghanistan War, the second Gulf War and the subsequent occupation, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and politicians reminded us, “Freedom is not Free.” This phrase, engraved on the Korean War...

Control and Freedom

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The Internet was sold as a medium of freedom though it is a technology of control.

The Internet is a technology based on control systems, yet it is also a mass medium celebrated as fostering personal and political freedom. How? Why? What dreams and desires drove...

Control and Freedom

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The claim that Buddhism is uniquely compatible with science is a polemical artifact of the 1870s.

In 1938, a Tibetan scholar named Gendun Chopel (1903-1951)—a poet, painter, and iconoclast—published an article (complete with his own hand-drawn map) in the Tibet Mirror, the only Tibetan-language newspaper of...

Buddhism and Science

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The claim that Buddhism is uniquely compatible with science is a polemical artifact of the 1870s.

I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...

Buddhism and Science

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The claim that Buddhism is uniquely compatible with science is a polemical artifact of the 1870s.

When we think about the relationship between Christianity and Science, iconic events like the trial of Galileo, the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, and the Scopes Trial come immediately to mind. One might...

Buddhism and Science

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Achilles' immortality at Leuke is early, and on his afterlife Homer is the odd man out.

Browsing readers would enjoy the first chapter of the book, in which the mythological “biography” of the hero is established, especially his childhood, often by relying on the evidence of...

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles

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Achilles' immortality at Leuke is early, and on his afterlife Homer is the odd man out.

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles looks at all types of ancient evidence about Achilles to reconstruct the basic outlines of his death and afterlife. For literary evidence, the Homeric...

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles

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On Achilles' death and afterlife, Homer is the odd man out.

In ancient myth, Achilles is killed by Paris as he tries to invade the gates of Troy. After being buried in a magnificent mound by the sea, his shade enjoys...

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles

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A dream invented by a playwright reveals Renaissance England as much as one a diarist actually had.

On page 6 the reader can find out how what dreams might mean. For example, to dream of asparagus gathered up and tied in bundles was an omen of tears,...

Dreaming the English Renaissance

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A dream invented by a playwright reveals Renaissance England as much as one a diarist actually had.

In the early 1990s, when I was completing the research for a book about Elizabeth I, I came across a document. It was a dream a woman named Joan Notte...

Dreaming the English Renaissance

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Dreams are historical evidence, not psychological data.

Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural...

Dreaming the English Renaissance

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Americans knew Cuba almost entirely through metaphors of their own making, and those metaphors were the mechanism of policy.

A prospective reader drawn by happenstance would do well to open the book to p. 175 and proceed to look through the chapter “On Gratitude as Moral Currency of Empire.”...

Cuba in the American Imagination

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Americans knew Cuba almost entirely through metaphors of their own making, and those metaphors were the mechanism of policy.

The premise of American nationhood in the nineteenth century was fully imbued with the presumption of possession of Cuba. The island insinuated itself into the American sense of nation, and...

Cuba in the American Imagination

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The metaphors Americans used for Cuba were not ornament but the mechanism of policy.

Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...

Cuba in the American Imagination

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Whether Mumler's spirit photographs were fraudulent is the wrong question.

For a quick zoom, I refer the reader to Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph and to the passages where he recounts this strange visitation in his memoirs, The Personal Experiences...

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer

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Whether Mumler's spirit photographs were fraudulent is the wrong question, since skeptic and believer each depend on the other.

The Strange Case offers a different kind of ghost story. Instead of the usual fare of haunted houses and wandering apparitions, these are photographic encounters with spirit-forms appearing in the...

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer

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Whether Mumler's spirit photographs were fraudulent is the wrong question, since skeptic and believer each depend on the other.

The story of William Mumler and the birth of spirit photography offer one of the most fascinating and haunting chapters in the history of the medium. In the 1860s, this...

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer

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Preventive war is now a general international norm, produced by the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s.

In chapter 4 I show how the move toward preventive military action is really an international phenomenon. Perhaps the most frustrating thing I found in writing the book is that...

Eve of Destruction

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Preventive war is now a general international norm, produced by the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s.

I actually did not intend to write a book on preventive war. A lot of people assumed I became interested in the subject because of the 1991 Gulf War, or...

Eve of Destruction

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Preventive war is now a general international norm, not an American aberration.

I wrote Eve of Destruction hoping to get people to understand that the previous era of warfare—one in which there were at least some rules about when and why states...

Eve of Destruction

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The European musical past survives in twentieth-century American media as a vernacular register ordinary listeners hear fluently.

All of the chapters are sectional in structure, with section headers. Anyone not interested in following the threads of the big arguments through the whole book might still find it...

Beautiful Monsters

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The European musical past survives in twentieth-century American media as a vernacular register ordinary listeners hear fluently.

The book moves fluidly, even unexpectedly, among chronological periods, genres, types of media, and among ways in which the “classic” has been defined since the second century C.E. All of...

Beautiful Monsters

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The European musical past lives in American popular media as a language ordinary listeners know.

Beautiful Monsters explores how “classical music,” and the idea of “the classic” itself, found a home in the American popular imagination. Concerns about the apparent cultural demise of classical music...

Beautiful Monsters

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Women produced the bulk of woman-centered advertising and supplied the woman's viewpoint that organized the mass-consumer industries.

In the 1870s, Mathilde Weil volunteered to secure advertising for a German society paper owned by the brother of her friend. Although the advertising manager could not offer any advertising...

Ad Women

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Women produced the bulk of woman-centered advertising and supplied the woman's viewpoint that organized the mass-consumer industries.

Although books on advertising history examine representations of gender, advertising history is a gendered narrative reflecting mostly men’s rather than women’s experience in advertising. To retell the history of advertising,...

Ad Women

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Women, not admen, created most of the advertising aimed at women.

For most of the twentieth century advertising portrayed women in narrow roles — as dim-witted sex objects, as perky young things in search of a man, or as one-dimensional homemakers...

Ad Women

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German law was corrupted before the Nazis took power, by judges and prosecutors while Weimar still stood.

The central moment of Hans Litten’s life was his cross-examination of Adolf Hitler, and this moment forms the heart of the book as well. In the narrative leading up to...

Crossing Hitler

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Berlin women between 1871 and 1918 built an alternative metropolis and used monumental architecture to make themselves public citizens.

The first image in the book depicts a woman builder making repairs to the roof of Berlin’s town hall. Balanced on a ladder high atop the city, this young woman...

A Women’s Berlin

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Berlin women between 1871 and 1918 built an alternative metropolis and used monumental architecture to make themselves public citizens.

Over the past decade, a series of books has examined women’s claims to urban space at the turn of the twentieth century as integral to the rise of the modern...

A Women’s Berlin

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German law was corrupted before the Nazis took power, by judges and prosecutors while Weimar still stood.

I am a historian of 20th century Germany, not a journalist or an expert on current American affairs. Yet there is no denying that the experience of the last eight...

Crossing Hitler

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Berlin women from 1871 to 1918 used monumental buildings to make themselves public citizens.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and...

A Women’s Berlin

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German law was corrupted before the Nazis took power, not after.

Crossing Hitler is a biography of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who devoted his legal practice to fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the late 1920s and 1930s, as...

Crossing Hitler

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Origin stories are political declarations, and modern human genetics is no exception.

There’s a rather quirky moment in the book which I hope might attract a casual reader’s eye. It’s important because I think it shows how powerful a perfectly absurd idea...

Adam’s Ancestors

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Origin stories are political declarations, and modern human genetics is no exception.

The wider cultural landscape within which Adam’s Ancestors is located has a number of landmarks on its horizon. First, I see it as a contribution to the study of the...

Adam’s Ancestors

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Origin stories are political declarations, and modern human genetics is no exception.

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

Adam’s Ancestors

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Reducing unsustainability will never produce sustainability, which appears only when the whole system is working.

A few years ago, I heard a speaker from a large retail chain give an impassioned presentation about what his firm was doing for sustainability. He told us about “dumpster...

Sustainability by Design

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Reducing unsustainability will never produce sustainability.

The germ of this book sprouted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I had returned in my mid-50s to start an academic career, after spending some 35 years working...

Sustainability by Design

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Reducing unsustainability will never produce sustainability, which appears only when the whole system is working.

Sustainability is all the rage. Political and business leaders talk earnestly and passionately about going green. A growing number of books, movies, and public conversations signal a general unease about...

Sustainability by Design

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The belief that without God there is no morality is a dangerous conflation of two separate domains.

The opening of chapter one introduces the reader to Leibniz as he arrives in Paris, ostensibly on a secret mission to establish world peace – or at least to persuade...

The Best of All Possible Worlds

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The belief that without God there is no morality is a dangerous conflation of two separate domains.

In writing this book, I had in mind a number of audiences, and not just academic ones. I hope to reach people interested in European intellectual history and in early...

The Best of All Possible Worlds

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Whether God is bound by reason or is pure will decides if the universe makes sense.

This book is about three philosophers – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Antoine Arnauld, and Nicolas Malebranche – who happened to be together in Paris in the 1670s and their great debate...

The Best of All Possible Worlds

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Schooling pursues three incompatible aims, socialization, academic inquiry and individual development, and so is doomed.

The beginning of Chapter 3 begins to lay out a different way in which we can conceive of how students learn to make sense of the world and their experience,...

The Future of Education

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Schooling pursues three incompatible aims, socialization, academic inquiry and individual development, and so is doomed.

I suppose, being a university professor dripping with awards and prizes, that I have played the schooling game well. But I was never sure what sense it all made. Why...

The Future of Education

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Schools fail because they pursue three aims that undermine one another.

The Future of Education is an attempt to do precisely what its subheading suggests—reimagine our schools from the ground up. The book begins with a scenario in which a priestess...

The Future of Education

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Photography constitutes a citizenry no sovereign can close, and watching is a duty the governed owe one another.

The first chapter of the book articulates the necessity to think the categories of citizenship and disaster together. What conditions prevent photos of horror of certain type of governed from...

The Civil Contract of Photography

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Photography constitutes a citizenry no sovereign can close, and watching is a duty the governed owe one another.

I began work on this book at the beginning of the second intifada. In hindsight, I can say that observing the unbearable sights presented in photographs from the Occupied Territories...

The Civil Contract of Photography

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Watching photographs is a civil duty the governed owe one another.

The Civil Contract of Photography is about the relations between photography and citizenship in disaster contexts. The book proposes a historical and theoretical analysis of the relation between photography and...

The Civil Contract of Photography

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Conspiracy theory is a subset of populism, which is why showing its factual errors never dissolves it.

In fact, two close-ups. The first is on page 17, a very brief discussion of what the book isn’t, as opposed to the remainder of the introduction, which identifies what the...

Conspiracy Theories

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Conspiracy theory is a subset of populism, which is why showing its factual errors never dissolves it.

I came to political consciousness in the 1970s. The first president I remember was Richard Nixon, and the first political controversies I remember were Watergate and the latter days of...

Conspiracy Theories

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Conspiracy theory is not a fringe pathology but a form of populism.

I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...

Conspiracy Theories

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Insects are the box cutters of biological warfare, and weaponizing them has tracked entomological science step for step.

An excerpt from the chapter on Japan’s biological warfare program, Unit 731: Merely dumping bacteria into the enemy’s water hadn’t infected enough people to trigger an outbreak. A new approach was...

Six-Legged Soldiers

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Insects are the box cutters of biological warfare, cheap, simple and wickedly effective.

Among the scientific, historical, and military themes in Six-Legged Soldiers, the reader will find three “big picture” ideas, all of which are cause for curiosity and concern. Using insects as weapons...

Six-Legged Soldiers

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Insects are the box cutters of biological warfare, and weaponizing them has tracked entomological science step for step.

Six-Legged Soldiers is a story, a bizarre and fantastic tale of how humans have conscripted the natural world—insects in particular—to do our bidding in times of war. For thousands of years...

Six-Legged Soldiers

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Even architecture specialists cannot say whether Le Corbusier was married, and what they think they know is wrong.

I got to Le Corbusier through his letters. It took me a long time to get him. When I began the book it was like facing a vault wall in...

Le Corbusier

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Even architecture specialists cannot say whether Le Corbusier was married, and what they think they know is wrong.

I am never quite sure of the meaning of the word “context.” One can talk about the context of history, in which case you would read a lot about Le...

Le Corbusier

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Le Corbusier the man is genuinely unknown.

There are hundreds of books about Le Corbusier’s architecture, but very little knowledge about the man himself. This book is an attempt to reveal Le Corbusier’s personality, his motivations, give...

Le Corbusier

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Silent cinema developed crosscutting and the feature film out of the effort to represent modern traffic.

Sections of chapter 4 focus on the first feature film, Traffic in Souls (1913), short films by D.W. Griffith, such as The Lonedale Operator (1911), and Lois Weber’s amazing film...

Picturing American Modernity

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Silent cinema developed crosscutting and the feature film out of the effort to represent modern traffic.

Picturing American Modernity is concerned with understanding how new (and old) forms of mass entertainment such as moving pictures, world’s fairs and expositions, electric light displays, live reenactments such as...

Picturing American Modernity

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Silent cinema developed its storytelling forms out of the effort to show modern networks of traffic.

Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were...

Picturing American Modernity

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Real health reform is a universal pool for hospitalization and chronic illness, with income-based subsidies for everything else.

To be meaningful, a proposal to reform the health care system needs to be more than just visionary, it must address the complex issues of how the system will actually...

Total Cure

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Extending access to a failing health system is not reform.

I am an economist who spent the last 35 years in a medical school training a wide range of post-doctoral fellows and undertaking applied research in an interdisciplinary setting. My...

Total Cure

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Real health reform is a universal pool for hospitalization and chronic illness, with income-based subsidies for everything else.

The current policy environment is one in which we must come to grips with the unsustainable increases in health care costs, the unconscionable proportion of the population without insurance, and...

Total Cure

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The rise and death of the Maine toothpick industry is the story of American industry in miniature.

One episode central to the story of the wooden toothpick in America is Charles Forster’s efforts at marketing. After he and his chief mechanic had gotten the machinery to make...

The Toothpick

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The rise and death of the Maine toothpick industry is the story of American industry in miniature.

The Toothpick is a book in the tradition of my previous book The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. I take as my principal subject an everyday object that...

The Toothpick

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The rise and death of the Maine toothpick industry is the story of American industry in miniature.

The Toothpick is a technical and cultural history of what is arguably the simplest of manufactured things. A wooden toothpick consists of a single part made of a single material...

The Toothpick

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Endless growth in wealth and population is a utopian delusion that entered the American imagination in the 1840s.

Start at Chapter One and read about the Satellite, Etzler’s mysterious machine, a cross between a plow and the Batmobile. The Satellite encompasses Etzler’s entire scheme, all his knowledge of...

The Great Delusion

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Endless growth in wealth and population is a utopian delusion that entered the American imagination in the 1840s.

My first thinking about growth and capitalism came from teaching the environmental history of the Atlantic World. Markets are central to the changes of the last 400 years. But in...

The Great Delusion

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Endless growth in wealth and population is a utopian delusion.

The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...

The Great Delusion

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Jazz trumpet let the sons and grandsons of slaves assert manhood loudly and draw applause rather than lynching.

A casual reader might want to start with page 106, the beginning of “Bending Brass,” the chapter in which I tell the story of my own experience with the trumpet....

Hotter Than That

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Jazz trumpet let the sons and grandsons of slaves assert manhood and win applause, not lynching.

The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive...

Hotter Than That

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Jazz trumpet let the sons and grandsons of slaves assert manhood loudly and draw applause rather than lynching.

This book is about the trumpet, but it brings the subject to life with several different approaches. First, it is a cultural history of the instrument, from the oldest surviving...

Hotter Than That

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Treating the presidential vote as the essence of democracy deskills citizens and strengthens the office whoever holds it.

The-president-as-superhero myth promises all the democracy with none of the work. As such it teaches citizens to admire rule by strong individuals and to abjure the messy workings—disagreement, slow debates,...

Bad for Democracy

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Our habit of putting the president at the center of democracy works against democracy.

As I finished my last book, National Manhood, a historical look at how notions of middle-class manhood and citizenship developed in the early United States, two movies about fictional presidents...

Bad for Democracy

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Treating the presidential vote as the essence of democracy deskills citizens and strengthens the office whoever holds it.

The first and biggest part of my book is about how we take the president for granted as the symbolic, cultural and institutional center of democracy, and how we take...

Bad for Democracy

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France took a century to recover from 1789 and found consensus only after the defeat of 1870.

The way in which the French related to the world outside is dealt with less as foreign policy than as ways in which French travellers discovered and commented on foreign...

Children of the Revolution

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France took a century to recover from 1789 and found consensus only after the defeat of 1870.

This is not just a political story, because that only tells part of what is fascinating about France in this period. What are the images we have of France in...

Children of the Revolution

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France took a century to recover from 1789 and found consensus only after the defeat of 1870.

‘The bloody truth about France’ was the heading of the London Sunday Times review of this book. For those who think France is about camembert and surrender, here is another...

Children of the Revolution

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Loneliness is a way of life, rooted in a missing mother, that shapes political as well as personal possibility.

The book’s epilogue is entitled “Writing.” It is short, about seven pages, but it tells a story about a trip I made to Ethiopia with my older brother, right before...

Loneliness as a Way of Life

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Loneliness is not a mood but a way of life.

I first approached this study as an intellectual history of individualism. From early on in my life as a political theorist, I have been interested in those large forces that...

Loneliness as a Way of Life

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Loneliness is a way of life, rooted in a missing mother, that shapes political as well as personal possibility.

The title is an almost absurdly clear description of the book, but the truth is, until my editor suggested that title to me, I wasn’t quite sure that what I...

Loneliness as a Way of Life

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Douglass and Lincoln were America's two preeminent self-made men, and self-making itself is antithetical to racism.

One of my favorite moments in Douglass and Lincoln’s relationship was at Lincoln’s second inaugural, when they met for the last time. It was as though in four years, the...

GIANTS

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Self-transformation helped challenge social hierarchies and reshape American ideals of freedom and equality.

It’s often said that biographies reveal as much about their biographers as their subject. I plead guilty, for I was born in Lincoln (Nebraska) and fell in love with the...

GIANTS

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Douglass and Lincoln were America's two preeminent self-made men, and self-making itself is antithetical to racism.

GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln is a dual biography of the two preeminent self-made men in American history. Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less...

GIANTS

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Public opinion is manufactured by the very political actors who claim to submit to it.

Many of the same Americans who believe in the Easter bunny also think that public opinion is a significant force in political life. Perhaps, not all would accept James Bryce’s...

The American Lie

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Ordinary citizens must approach politics with skepticism rather than trust because political leaders routinely use deception and manipulation to advance their own interests at the public’s expense.

In more than thirty years of teaching politics, I have observed that students’ natural healthy cynicism is constantly criticized by the press and by their teachers. I want to assure...

The American Lie

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Public opinion is manufactured by the very political actors who claim to submit to it.

Americans are constantly urged to involve themselves in political life, to pay attention to the issues, to vote for the best candidates and, above all, to avoid succumbing to political...

The American Lie

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African religious practice pervades the popular music of the Americas, surviving as form and so reading as secular.

There are a number of individual moments in the book I would want a reader to find on first browsing, so it is hard to choose only one. On balance,...

Secular Devotion

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Popular music in the Americas remains deeply shaped by African religious traditions.

A great deal of what I am saying depends on the claim that black musical genres and belief-systems are part of a single, unified complex in the Americas from Brazil...

Secular Devotion

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