All the threads

Corporate support for Black culture is not altruism but an asset the firm builds for itself.

“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...

Black Culture, Inc.

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Corporate support for Black culture is diversity capital, an asset the firm accumulates for itself.

In recent years there has been growing attention to the social responsibility of business. With a focus on ethnic community support (i.e., philanthropy and sponsorships related to ethnoracial minorities), Black...

Black Culture, Inc.

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Rules are a medium of contemporary art, so a work's meaning cannot be read off its physical object.

In the first chapter, I delve into examples to show how rules affect an artwork’s meanings. In 1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created a work called “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). To display it, the museum installs a pile of colorful wrapped hard candies with...

Immaterial

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Rules are a medium of contemporary art, so a work's meaning cannot be read off its physical object.

Contemporary art seems chaotic. Works can be made out of materials ranging from sugar to ladders to lard. Parts may be intentionally hidden from the audience, objects allowed to deteriorate...

Immaterial

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Rules are a medium of contemporary art, like paint for a painter.

During an early professional experience writing about artworks for a large public art museum, I had access to files containing fascinating correspondence between artists and the museum. I found diagrams, instructions...

Immaterial

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African restitution claims began in 1965 and were defeated by European museum directors, so today's debate happened forty years ago.

Film and literature play a central role in the restitution debate of the 1970s, opening a space for political imagination. Many African filmmakers trained in former large colonial cities, where...

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art

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African restitution claims began in 1965 and were defeated by European museum directors, so today's debate happened forty years ago.

I began my academic career as an art historian exploring Napoleon’s art theft in Europe and the ensuing trauma of what I came to refer to as translocation. Whereas Napoleon...

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art

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Africa's claims for the return of its art were made, and defeated, forty years ago.

From the 1960s onwards, European museum directors managed to hold off restitution claims from African countries for cultural property looted during the colonial era by strategically closing ranks and relying...

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art

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The modern week took hold because nineteenth-century Americans acquired dozens of separate reasons to know where they stood in it.

I wrote the book’s preface in the expectation that it would draw a potential reader into a deceptively familiar subject. The global shutdown in 2020 exposed all sorts of odd...

The Week

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The modern week took hold because people acquired dozens of separate reasons to track it.

This is a book about how we experience and imagine time. Although treatments of that subject often focus on the clock, modern time consciousness is organized around calendars as well....

The Week

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The modern week took hold because nineteenth-century Americans acquired dozens of separate reasons to know where they stood in it.

Historians traffic in timekeeping, and time is the fundamental building block of historical scholarship, whether we are telling stories about change, persistence, sequence, or simultaneity. So in a way, books...

The Week

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Nature versus nurture is a weapon inside the aggression debate, and the killer instinct's 1960s rise was persuasion, not evidence.

Are human beings innately violent? And when scientists give us an answer to this question, should we believe them? Killer Instinct is a history of debates about human nature. My...

Killer Instinct

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Nature versus nurture is a weapon inside the aggression debate, and the killer instinct's 1960s rise was persuasion, not evidence.

War is in our genes. Humans are “hard wired” to divide the world into “us” versus “them.” Men have a penchant for rape. We have all encountered claims like these...

Killer Instinct

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Nature versus nurture is not a description of the aggression debate but a weapon in it.

The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...

Killer Instinct

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Human evolution is a braided river, not a branching tree.

In modern day life, often people look at archaeology and they think, you know that’s interesting, but it’s not relevant to me. But actually, archaeology does have a great deal...

The World Before Us

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Human evolution is a braided river, and our being the only surviving Homo is luck rather than cognitive superiority.

The World Before Us is a story of the human past. If you go back 50,000 years, perhaps slightly earlier, you find this incredible situation on the earth. There weren’t...

The World Before Us

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Human evolution is a braided river, and our being the only surviving Homo is luck rather than cognitive superiority.

Is this what you would call a golden age of research? It's a combination of things. There has been a huge amount of excavation work and research over the past 150...

The World Before Us

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Instruments made the inner senses measurable between 1833 and 1945, and the same instruments went straight to the factory floor.

What I have written so far might potentially seem incongruous or over-ambitious. How can a book like this do justice to the scientific material, yet also say something about the...

How We Became Sensorimotor

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The inner senses were not discovered but made measurable by instruments.

The book is a social history of the science of the body’s inner senses. We think we know about the five senses that Aristotle had identified and placed into a...

How We Became Sensorimotor

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Instruments made the inner senses measurable between 1833 and 1945, and the same instruments went straight to the factory floor.

Given the philosophical training I received, I was rather frustrated that the recent philosophy of the embodied, extended, embedded, and enactive mind, collectively known in some philosophical circles as 4E,...

How We Became Sensorimotor

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Beijing needs Hong Kong as a financial gateway, which requires visible autonomy, and needs political control, which destroys it.

I hope any browsing reader will spend time with the many figures showing Hong Kong’s financial centrality in the Chinese economy that can be found in the chapter about Hong...

City on the Edge

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Beijing needs Hong Kong as a financial gateway, which requires visible autonomy, and needs political control, which destroys it.

Hong Kong has been my hometown, where I grew up before leaving for the United States. My area of research has been the political economy of global capitalism, Chinese development,...

City on the Edge

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Beijing needs Hong Kong's autonomy and needs to control it, a contradiction it cannot resolve.

The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical...

City on the Edge

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Fingerprints, bitemarks, firearms and hair analysis have never had their founding premises validated, so an expert's 100-percent identification is unsupportable.

Forensic analysis is perhaps best known through its fictional portrayals in crime novels and television courtroom dramas: A crime occurs, law enforcement gathers evidence from the scene, and a team...

Autopsy of a Crime Lab

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The forensic techniques courts rely on daily have never had their founding premises validated.

Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...

Autopsy of a Crime Lab

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Fingerprints, bitemarks, firearms and hair analysis have never had their founding premises validated, so an expert's 100-percent identification is unsupportable.

“That’s not my fingerprint, your honor,” said the defendant, after FBI experts reported a “100-percent identification.” They were wrong. The judge sided with the FBI and ordered the defendant, Brandon Mayfield detained...

Autopsy of a Crime Lab

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Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and Braudel's longue durée took form through exchange with Brazilian interlocutors at the young University of São Paulo.

They say not to judge a book by its cover or by the images contained within it. I have to say, however, I spent a lot of time thinking about...

Terms of Exchange

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Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and Braudel's longue durée took form through exchange with Brazilian interlocutors at the young University of São Paulo.

Beyond its specific contributions to the historical field, this book responds to two major challenges of our present moment: 1) to recognize the contributions of Latin America and the “Global...

Terms of Exchange

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Modern French social science took form through exchange with Brazilians at the University of São Paulo.

Terms of Exchange is about Brazilian and French intellectuals and the dialogues between them that were foundational to the emergence of the modern social sciences. The book examines the interactions...

Terms of Exchange

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Late-GDR experimental artists worked through state art schools and official venues, and the Stasi's outsized presence was ineffective.

In fact, I’d want the reader to really take a good look at the cover of the book. The photograph comes from a Stasi surveillance file of a groundbreaking art...

Parallel Public

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Late-GDR experimental artists worked through state art schools and official venues, and the Stasi's outsized presence was ineffective.

Parallel Public introduces material that is new to German art history, particularly in relation to an idea of artistic autonomy or independent thought in the oppressive context of East Germany....

Parallel Public

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Late East German experimental artists worked in the open, not in the shadows.

Parallel Public examines experimental art from the final years of East Germany in relation to state power. In the book, I argue that these artists did not practice their art...

Parallel Public

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Literature yields existential and sentient knowledge, and that, not any political payoff, is why we read it.

The Lives of Literature tackles the central, all-too-unasked, question that undergirds my teaching and writing career: why read literature? It’s the question all students ponder—why read these books?—and it seems...

The Lives of Literature

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We read literature for existential and experiential knowledge, not for any political payoff.

Today, our students and their professors very often read literature through a political lens: what does this book tell us about the ideological arrangements in play in either the author’s...

The Lives of Literature

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Literature yields existential and sentient knowledge, and that, not any political payoff, is why we read it.

This book is intentionally hybrid: it mixes literary criticism, commentary on teaching, reflections on the role of the Humanities, and personal memoir. This was a risky choice, on my end,...

The Lives of Literature

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The fates of communist regimes followed from the kind of regime each became after Stalin.

In the course of presenting this narrative interpretation of the rise and demise of world communism, I address some of the key questions that animate debate among both advocates and...

The Rise and Demise of World Communism

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Communist regimes were a single Stalinist type until 1953, and their divergent fates follow from the post-Stalinist regime each became.

In crafting this book, I was inspired by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, in which very short chapters heightened the drama and kept the reader moving along. My book...

The Rise and Demise of World Communism

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Communist regimes were a single Stalinist type until 1953, and their divergent fates follow from the post-Stalinist regime each became.

The rise and demise of world communism was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. It was born in wars (World War I, World II), and offered an...

The Rise and Demise of World Communism

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Mao's China traded with the capitalist world all along, and those deals made the later turn to global capitalism possible.

Market Maoists tells the story of the commercial relationships that linked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to various capitalist firms, traders, and markets around the world during the Mao era....

Market Maoists

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Mao's China traded with the capitalist world all along, and those deals made the later turn to global capitalism possible.

I would want a browser to start with page 12, the first page of chapter 1, which tells the story of how the CCP built its first international trade network....

Market Maoists

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Trade under Mao, not the 1978 break, prepared China's turn to global capitalism.

So much of the public discussion about China today concerns the question of where the nation is headed. What are China’s intentions in the world? Part of this debate draws...

Market Maoists

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Peaceful nuclear technology was one of the century's most effective political weapons, used by every president from Truman to Reagan.

The Wretched Atom is a global history of so-called peaceful nuclear technologies. It asks provocative questions about how we frame these as an escape from environmental pressures and as a...

The Wretched Atom

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Peaceful nuclear technology was one of the century's most effective political weapons.

A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten...

The Wretched Atom

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Peaceful nuclear technology was one of the century's most effective political weapons, used by every president from Truman to Reagan.

I have a hard time deciding what is the best entry point for this book. Some people will be fascinated by the story about the CIA collaborating with a Japanese...

The Wretched Atom

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Forgery is a legitimate artistic practice, and the forgery is the masterpiece's dark double.

My book critiques Romantic ideas of authorship—for example, that a single creator is responsible for each work of art, and that art is primarily expressive—to argue instead that creation is...

Fake It

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Forgery is a legitimate artistic practice, and the forgery is the masterpiece's dark double.

A browsing reader would note that the book is a feast for the eyes. It includes twenty-seven images of paintings, movie stills, and art installations ranging from the Early Modern...

Fake It

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Forgery is a legitimate artistic practice, not merely a crime.

Fake It investigates a set of fictional literary and art forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations that range from the 1660s to the twenty-first century. In the prologue, I...

Fake It

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Fake news is a scapegoat, and the real danger is fake journalism, born with real journalism around 1900.

The heart of the book consists of a series of case studies—some ugly, some disturbing, some embarrassing, a few humorous—that illustrate important moments of tension involving journalism, news consumers, and...

Not Exactly Lying

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The real danger to public life is not fake news but fake journalism.

The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...

Not Exactly Lying

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Fake news is a scapegoat, and the real danger is fake journalism, born with real journalism around 1900.

Not Exactly Lying stands apart from the flood of recent writing on the phenomena of misinformation, disinformation, and journalistic deception. Donald Trump did not, as he claimed, invent the term...

Not Exactly Lying

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Views on genomics do not sort by party, and the split that matters is between precautionary and pro-active people.

Knowledgeable observers suggest that, just as physics shaped the twentieth century for both good (space flight) and ill (atomic bombs), so biology will shape the twenty-first century. As with physics...

Genomic Politics

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Views on genomics do not sort by party, and the split that matters is between precautionary and pro-active people.

A great deal of activity, ranging from public policies to address poverty or climate change, to individual choices about whether to change a job or marry one’s partner, depends on...

Genomic Politics

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Views on genomics split by attitudes to risk, not by party.

Readers who seek a taste of Genomic Politics might want to read chapter 1 (which presents the controversies around each case and the typology for understanding the controversies) and chapter...

Genomic Politics

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The immigration courts' dysfunction is structural, improvised in 1940 out of fear of a Nazi fifth column that never existed.

One of my favorite moments in the book—and in researching it—appears on pages 97-98. On Tuesday, May 21, 1940, FDR had summoned his attorney general, Robert H. Jackson, to the...

The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts

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The dysfunction of US immigration courts is structural, not a backlog problem.

After years of teaching courses about immigration and administrative law and thinking out loud with my students about the structure of the executive branch, I could not explain why the...

The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts

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The immigration courts' dysfunction is structural, improvised in 1940 out of fear of a Nazi fifth column that never existed.

The immigration courts are dysfunctional. As of November 2022, there were more than 2 million cases pending nationwide. Many people wait years to have their cases heard, while others (as...

The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts

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Dehumanization works because its victims are seen as human vermin, uncanny fusions of fellow human and subhuman creature.

In 2006, I was researching wartime propaganda and was struck by the extent to which enemies are represented as less-than-human creatures. Turning to the relevant research literature, I discovered that...

Making Monsters

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Dehumanization works because its victims are seen as human vermin, uncanny fusions of fellow human and subhuman creature.

If you, the reader, were thumbing through Making Monsters in a bookstore, I hope that you would first glance at the preface, which begins with the testimony of a man...

Making Monsters

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Dehumanization casts people not simply as vermin but as human vermin, uncanny monsters.

Making Monsters is about the phenomenon of dehumanization, a phenomenon that is implicated in the most hideous acts that human beings have inflicted upon one another. Perpetrators of mass violence...

Making Monsters

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Untranslated French words like ennui and naïveté are keywords in Raymond Williams's sense, and they entered English by creolization.

I have long been struck by how much and how deeply English borrows from French. My training was in French and English literature. My first book explored the literary and...

Émigrés

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Untranslated French words like ennui and naïveté are keywords in Raymond Williams's sense, and they entered English by creolization.

I’d like readers to find their way to the book’s opening page. That page leads into the center of the book’s preoccupations by an indirect route, for it reveals an...

Émigrés

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French words that English never translated, like ennui and naïveté, are English keywords too.

George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that...

Émigrés

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There is no scientific method, and invoking one as the guarantor of expertise now does more harm than good.

What the book is all about is right there in the title! Well, sort of. The book isn’t about the scientific method—since it starts by pointing out that there’s no such...

The Scientific Method

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There is no scientific method.

Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants of Doubt, their account of organized science...

The Scientific Method

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There is no scientific method, and invoking one as the guarantor of expertise now does more harm than good.

I think a lot of these points come together in Chapter 6, which is called “Animal Intelligence.” The title gives a pretty good sense of what’s in there: scientists trying...

The Scientific Method

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Paintings of food are not still lifes, and Manet's fish conjure the corpses of the new Paris Morgue.

If a reader picked up Discomfort Food at a bookstore—enticed, I hope, by the suggestive cover—I would be so pleased if they looked through the introduction “Beginnings,” where I establish...

Discomfort Food

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Paintings of food are not still lifes, and Manet's fish conjure the corpses of the new Paris Morgue.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, this book took root during a visit years ago to the National Gallery of Art when I happened upon Antoine Vollon’s Mound...

Discomfort Food

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Paintings of food are not still lifes.

In Discomfort Food, I argue that representations of food are profoundly evocative, able to convey material and immaterial possibilities that are inconsistent with their seemingly mundane subject matter. Depictions of...

Discomfort Food

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Veblen was an academic insider par excellence, and his heterodox economics came from that position rather than from marginality.

I would be happy if readers opened Chapter 3, “Beginnings.” Here I tell a family story and a national story as a prelude to the story of Thorstein Veblen as...

Veblen

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Veblen was an academic insider par excellence, and his heterodox economics came from that position rather than from marginality.

The book, Veblen, is about intellectual innovation, and how originality is shaped by the accumulation of schooling experiences. It examines a great American original, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), a heterodox economist...

Veblen

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Veblen was not an academic outsider but an insider par excellence.

I came to write Veblen out of years of skepticism about the “outsider thesis.” Added to this was my frustration, at once theoretical and methodological, with the tendency of intellectual...

Veblen

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Almost none of the leading founders kept the optimism of 1787, and American politics was worse when they ran it.

Like many Americans, I have long enjoyed reading popular biographies of the founders—the kind that academic historians sometimes deride as “founders chic.” Until fairly recently my own research centered on...

Fears of a Setting Sun

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Almost none of the leading founders kept the optimism of 1787 to the end.

One of the highlights of the book, I think, comes in the chapter on Jefferson and slavery. The Missouri crisis of 1819-21, which revolved around whether Missouri would be admitted...

Fears of a Setting Sun

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Almost none of the leading founders kept the optimism of 1787, and American politics was worse when they ran it.

Fears of a Setting Sun tells the story of how most of the American founders came to feel deep anxiety, disappointment, and even despair about the government and the nation...

Fears of a Setting Sun

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Robert Kennedy belongs at the center of the 1960s struggle for racial justice.

Some readers will probably turn to the images first—and that is a good place to start. There are two inserts that tell the story in pictures. We see Kennedy on...

Justice Rising

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Robert Kennedy belongs at the center of the 1960s struggle for racial justice, a crisis that was national, not southern.

My last book was a history of the early decades of the NAACP, from its founding in 1909 up through the 1950s. Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making...

Justice Rising

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Robert Kennedy belongs at the center of the 1960s struggle for racial justice, a crisis that was national, not southern.

Justice Rising places Robert Kennedy squarely at the center of the movement for racial justice in the 1960s. In reconsidering Kennedy’s public life, the book offers a fresh account of...

Justice Rising

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History renders no verdict, only a record of contention.

The book examines three cases: the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-6, at the end of the Second World War; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at...

On the Judgment of History

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The judgment of history is a fantasy, and history renders no verdict at all, only a record of contention.

We hear a lot these days about the judgment of history. In the face of political conflict, corruption, and sheer lies, we sometimes comfort ourselves by saying that “history” will...

On the Judgment of History

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The judgment of history is a fantasy, and history renders no verdict at all, only a record of contention.

If a reader happened upon the book in a bookstore, I’d hope they would read the first pages of the introduction, which explains why I came to do the book;...

On the Judgment of History

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A Free and Responsible Press (1947) is the most important statement ever produced on the press's role in a democracy.

A Free and Responsible Press is a classic, but many of the Commission’s most incisive and prescient observations didn’t make it into the book. As the transcripts of their meetings...

An Aristocracy of Critics

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A Free and Responsible Press (1947) is the most important statement ever produced on the press's role in a democracy.

In 1943, Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce sponsored the greatest collaboration of public intellectuals in the twentieth century. He and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins summoned the...

An Aristocracy of Critics

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A Free and Responsible Press (1947) is the most important statement on the press in a democracy.

Part of the backdrop to the Commission on Freedom of the Press is the acrimonious relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the press. I knew a bit about...

An Aristocracy of Critics

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The best writing about American popular music comes from non-academics and oddballs who invented their own form.

I have had two careers and this book meets at their intersection. As a Village Voice and Spin rock critic and editor, I came in at the end of the...

Songbooks

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The best writing about American popular music comes from non-academics and oddballs.

Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary...

Songbooks

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The best writing about American popular music comes from non-academics and oddballs who invented their own form.

I’d hope that a browsing reader would check out a trio of entries (most are under 1000 words!) and get a sniff of the thing. For example:Early in the book:...

Songbooks

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Poe was one of many who saw opportunity in the growing cities of the 1830s and 1840s and found frustration.

The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe...

The Man of the Crowd

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Poe was one of many who saw opportunity in the growing cities of the 1830s and 1840s and found frustration.

The Man of the Crowd is a biography of Edgar Allan Poe that focuses on the four American cities—Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York—where he made his career as a...

The Man of the Crowd

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Poe's career is inseparable from the rapid growth of American cities.

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

The Man of the Crowd

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Global jihad is not one movement but four distinct waves.

There are two main audiences for this book. First, anyone interested in the history of the global jihad movement, including its intellectual precursors, its development, its ideologies, and its structural...

Global Jihad

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Global jihad is four distinct waves, and it belongs with white nationalism and the Khmer Rouge among movements of rage.

In Global Jihad I make two unique arguments. First, I provide an interpretive history of this important movement by showing how there have been four distinct iterations, or “waves”, of...

Global Jihad

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Global jihad is four distinct waves, and it belongs with white nationalism and the Khmer Rouge among movements of rage.

A “just browsing” reader would be well-served by reading the very short, 3-page Preface to get a better sense of what the whole book is about. Indeed, the scope of...

Global Jihad

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Press freedom survived Churchill's near-shutdown of the Daily Mirror because of institutional restraints and because rival papers rallied to it.

Although it is a book about one person it is also about the development of the media over a period of nine decades. It is very intriguing to consider how the press operates now and how...

Winston Churchill

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Press freedom survived Churchill because institutions and rival papers stood together.

I have to say the first pages in the book should be read first because I deliberately wrote them in order to draw the reader in. They tell of an...

Winston Churchill

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Press freedom survived Churchill's near-shutdown of the Daily Mirror because of institutional restraints and because rival papers rallied to it.

The book is about Winston Churchill’s relationship with the media and the news. Churchill was active in politics from the age of Queen Victoria to that of Elizabeth II, a...

Winston Churchill

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The physics and neuroscience behind every musical style can be taught with grade-school arithmetic, and conservatories teach none of it.

Perhaps the best way for a reader to begin is to peruse the questions that start each chapter and find ones that are of interest to them. The answers can...

Music, Math, and Mind

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The physics and neuroscience behind every musical style can be taught with grade-school arithmetic, and conservatories teach none of it.

There are more styles of human music than there are human societies. But underlying all of them, even paleolithic styles, which can be deduced from surviving instruments in caves made...

Music, Math, and Mind

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The science of music can be taught to any musician with grade-school arithmetic.

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

Music, Math, and Mind

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For most of its history the European Community was a narrow economic organization with little direct effect on people's lives.

Project Europe offers a radically different interpretation of the European Union’s history. It shifts the focus away from the motives and driving forces of European integration to the concrete effects...

Project Europe

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The EU's present importance cannot be read back into its past.

By studying the history of the European Union, the book argues that the current crises are not as unique as we might think. Even Brexit is not as singular and...

Project Europe

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