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This is the first book to tell the fascinating story of American isolationism across the full arc of U.S. history. The United States that we know today has dominated global...

Isolationism - In a nutshell

Andre Wakefield

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

The Disordered Police State - The wide angle

Carolyn Bronstein

Battling Pornography chronicles the formation and development of an American feminist anti-pornography movement from 1976 to 1986. The book emphasizes the internal movement dynamics and external structural factors that supported...

Battling Pornography - In a nutshell

Mabel Berezin

My work concerns democracy, culture and political engagement. Scholars usually analyze democracy through the study of liberal political regimes and movements or post-authoritarian transitions. In contrast, I have focused on...

Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times - The wide angle

Robert Engelman

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 - In a nutshell

Jeff Allred

A central argument of my book is that the modernist element within Depression documentary was not merely aesthetic but intimately related to the turbulent politics of the Depression era. Perhaps...

American Modernism and Depression Documentary - The wide angle

Eric Ames

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 - The wide angle

Donald Weinstein

This is a biography of Girolamo Savonarola the fifteenth century penitential preacher who captivated Florence, the first city of the Renaissance, with his prophecies of civic glory and millennium.Fra Girolamo...

Savonarola - In a nutshell

Renée L. Beard

I think the prologue does a particularly good job of depicting why people seek evaluation, how they feel during it, and most crucially, what can go wrong in the delivery...

Living with Alzheimer’s - A close-up

Marnia Lazreg

This book started out as a reflection on why it is that in the past two decades a re-veiling trend has swept over the Muslim world and Muslim communities in...

Questioning the Veil - In a nutshell

Nicole Howard

On page 61 of the book, I quote the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, who offers “Advice for Idiots” who might attempt to read his book. His tone is sharp and...

Loath to Print - A close-up

Jonathan Walker

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622.In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy - In a nutshell

David N. Livingstone

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 - A close-up

Thomas Borstelmann

I would—of course, I did—start with the Preface. It aims to draw the reader directly into the problem of Americans and foreigners, and how I see the development of this...

Just Like Us - A close-up

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

The fun thing about writing a book about an emerging phenomenon is that there is always something surprising to learn.If I could direct readers to any part of the book,...

The Beautiful Generation - A close-up

Meirav Jones

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought- In a nutshell

Nancy Leys Stepan

One of the strange things about eradication is how it repeatedly arises, phoenix-like, from its setbacks.Fred Lowe Soper paradoxically embraced the cause of disease eradication in the 1930s, just as...

On the continued appeal of disease eradication

Antone Martinho-Truswell

If you think about some of the things that really define what it is to be human, the first one you’re going to go to is our intelligence. We have...

The Parrot in the Mirror - The wide angle

Edward Ashford Lee

We are all used to the idea that humanity shapes technology. After all, we humans are the designers, right? Wait. Maybe we are being a bit arrogant here. The French...

The Coevolution - In a nutshell

Paula Lupkin

The American Young Men’s Christian Association, which began as a Protestant evangelical voluntary association in the 1850s, built hundreds of buildings in the years between the Civil War and the...

Manhood Factories - The wide angle

David Sepkoski

Scientific and cultural spheres are not separate but intertwined, and have been, since the emergence of professional scientific disciplines more than 200 years ago. Science is, like art, politics, economics,...

Catastrophic Thinking - The wide angle

Mark Bartholomew

Chapter 4, “From Market Share to Mindshare,” is about the new discipline of neuromarketing. The ability to monitor consumers’ biological responses to commercials in real time has led to more...

Adcreep - A close-up

Arnold Weinstein

As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them.How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...

The Lives of Literature - The wide angle

Sara Blaylock

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 - A close-up

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

This book is about the first skyscrapers in the world, those built in Chicago in the 1880s and 90s. The unprecedented sixteen-story buildings lining La Salle and Dearborn Streets gave...

Chicago 1890 - In a nutshell

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

In the book’s introduction I explain Puerto Rico’s state in relation to other commonwealth states.Chapter One, “State and Artifice,” examines the eighteenth-century paintings of José Campeche and the nineteenth-century painting...

Mainland Passage - A close-up

Monika Zagar

Hamsun’s actions in the few short summer months of 1943 define him, clarifying his unreserved support of the Nazi program. He writes an admiring letter to Joseph Goebbels and sends...

Knut Hamsun - A close-up

Olivier Alexandre

I guess there are different ways to read this book. I designed it to make people see Silicon Valley in 3D. Like the cover does: it shows Silicon Valley in...

Tech - A close-up

S. Jonathan Wiesen

This book is about buying and selling in Nazi Germany. It seeks to understand how the daily business of producing, marketing, shopping, and consuming took place under a racist dictatorship....

Creating the Nazi Marketplace - In a nutshell

Daniel Martin Varisco

The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how...

Reading Orientalism - The wide angle

Gary Steiner

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 - In a nutshell

Ethan Tussey

The complexity of the procrastination economy is best displayed by the mobile culture on the commute. In chapter three, I examine this culture by analyzing the creative process behind Spotify’s...

The Procrastination Economy - A close-up

John C. Burnham

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, worldwide 1,200,000 people died in traffic accidents alone. A hundred years earlier, industrial accidents were already being counted in the millions. Economic costs...

Accident Prone - The wide angle

Roland Burke

My book charts the shifting impact of decolonization on the human rights project. I challenge the presumption that the colonized were marginal players in the construction of the human rights...

Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights - In a nutshell

Richard J. McNally

The standard view of medicine holds that observant clinicians discover diseases in nature. Accordingly, psychiatrists are no different from other doctors. They, too, discern forms of pathology arising from dysfunctions...

The roots of mental pathologies

John Tully

Few people today except dentists will have heard of gutta-percha, but one hundred years ago it was a household word. A close cousin of rubber extracted from wild trees in...

The Devil’s Milk - A close-up

Joe Roman

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

Ecological economics

E. Fuller Torrey

Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods argues that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging...

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods - In a nutshell

April D. DeConick

In The Gnostic New Age, I tell the powerful story of how gnostic groups arose in the first century CE as countercultural religious innovators, offering people in antiquity a completely...

The Gnostic New Age - In a nutshell

Amanda Boeztkes

If you were to approach this book at a bookstore, you would immediately be struck by the cover image. It’s a photograph of a couple sealed in plastic together with...

Plastic Capitalism - A close-up

Nancy Um

This book intervenes in one of the long-standing issues in Middle Eastern studies regarding the shape and analysis of the Arab city. Urban scholars agree that the conception of the...

The Merchant Houses of Mocha - A close-up

Carl Wennerlind

In a letter of June 29, 1940, Max Horkheimer eloquently developed one of the metaphors that became central to the history of Critical Theory in America. Writing to the actress...

Casualties of Credit - The wide angle

Todd McGowan

From the first time I tried to read Hegel, I remember how intimidating I found his language and yet how enticing his ideas were to me. As a result, I...

Emancipation After Hegel - The wide angle

Michael D. Kirchhoff

My interest in discussions about scientific modeling, idealization and scientific realism started with a coauthored paper “The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism”, published...

The Idealized Mind - The wide angle

Ian Almond

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 - In a nutshell

Anne Dunlop

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

Painted Palaces - A close-up

Archie Brown

What is your new book all about?It’s about the biggest political event of the second half of the twentieth century—the end of the Cold War. Linked to that was the...

The Human Factor - In a nutshell

Philip Goodchild

Capital growth begins with borrowing for investment. For all economic activity is limited by the supply of money: there is always so much more that could be done, if only...

Theology of Money - A close-up

Philip G. Cerny

In the 21st century, national governments are too small to provide the kind of public goods (international? transnational? global?) that are necessary to make things work, opening the way for...

nan - The wide angle

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

The story of the Russian Revolution has more often been told from the perspective of the active participants in the revolution, whether they were the leaders of political groups or...