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The completion in 1884 of the Washington Monument—the great obelisk in the center of the Mall—is the pivotal moment in the book’s larger narrative. While the project began in the...

Monument Wars - A close-up

David M. Struthers

With regard to the larger picture, my book chronicles moral and legal conflicts, political intrigue, retribution, and drastic consequences—all of which were unintended.There is a dark evil here, smoldering under...

The World in a City - The wide angle

Richard Ned Lebow

There is a burgeoning literature on war and its causes. Almost all major studies approach the problem from a realist perspective. They assume security is the principal motive of states...

Why Nations Fight - In a nutshell

Peter H. Schuck

One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014).Why...

One Nation Undecided - In a nutshell

Rachel Herz

The general rubric under which the concepts of this book are laid out is evolutionary biology. The core positions are about how and why the emotion of disgust aids in...

That’s Disgusting - The wide angle

George R. Packard

I found Reischauer’s life to be profoundly interesting, and perhaps even tragic, as a human interest story.His younger sister, Felicia, was born deaf and mute, and Ed had to help...

Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan - A close-up

Jennifer L. Allen

In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...

Sustainable Utopias - The wide angle

Michael F. O’Riley

I’d draw the attention of your “browser” to the book’s first chapter.The first chapter of Cinema in an Age of Terror discusses The Battle of Algiers, a film by the...

Cinema in an Age of Terror - A close-up

Frank O. Bowman III

If the random reader encountered the book in a bookstore, I suppose I’d most want them to glance through one (or all) of three chapters:Chapter Four describes the Framers’ deliberations...

High Crimes and Misdemeanors - A close-up

Michael A. Haedicke

A unique and compelling feature of my book is its use of interviews and archival documents to explore how people understand organic foods and farming in very different ways. The...

Organizing Organic - A close-up

Mark Paterson

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 - The wide angle

Roger Ekirch

The prologue of Birthright is the portion to which I devoted the most energy. If it does not capture the reader’s imagination, chances are that the rest of the book...

Birthright - A close-up

William Egginton

Will religious moderation be practiced more or less in the future? In many ways the survival of societies committed to the values of tolerance, progress, and the peaceful exchange of...

The future of religious moderation

Jinting Wu

At the end of the American Civil War, tens of thousands of pioneer families took Horace Greeley’s advice to “go West.” Streaming across the Mississippi, they settled in Iowa and...

Fabricating an Educational Miracle - The wide angle

Heather Cox Richardson

While the final paragraph of the introduction is perhaps the best synopsis of the book’s argument (page 18), my favorite paragraph in the book is on page 277.This paragraph tells...

Wounded Knee - A close-up

Alfonso W. Quiroz

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 - The wide angle

David Farber

While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...

Crack - A close-up

Kathryn Allamong Jacob

By the early 1870s, Sam Ward was becoming known as the "King of the Lobby.” While there was a dash of hyperbole in the title, Sam loved it. To his...

King of the Lobby - A close-up

Stephen F. Cohen

The story of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust is widely known. The story of surviving victims of Stalin’s 25-year terror is virtually unknown in the West—and even in Russia itself....

The Victims Return - In a nutshell

Philip Lieberman

Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, is often cited but hardly ever read. My book presents the observations and the concepts that he actually proposed because they...

The Theory That Changed Everything - In a nutshell

Robert E. Hegel

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China - The wide angle

Ann Marie Stock

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

On Location in Cuba - The wide angle

Ho-fung Hung

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 - A close-up

Jennifer Scanlon

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 - The wide angle

Ethan B. Katz

I first became interested in this topic because of a few long-standing interests: French history, Jewish history, and the past and present of the struggle between Jews and Arabs in...

The Burdens of Brotherhood - The wide angle

Joshua Shannon

I came to this topic as an art historian, trying to make sense of some art I really liked but couldn’t understand or explain. As I looked at the art...

The Disappearance of Objects - The wide angle

Jeffrey C. Alexander

If you were to just pick up The Performance of Politics in a bookstore—perhaps attracted by the striking cover photo of Obama striding confidently to a podium in Denver to...

The Performance of Politics - A close-up

Francesco Boldizzoni

Foretelling the End of Capitalism looks back into the past to answer key questions for our time. But this has nothing to do with the uses of the past one...

Foretelling the End of Capitalism - The wide angle

George R. Packard

The book highlights the hubris and conceit of American foreign policy.We seem to believe that we can dictate to other nations, and spread our democratic “way of life” at the...

Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan - The wide angle

Mark S. Manger

I’ve developed an analytical framework in which politicians and bureaucrats mainly respond to demands from economic interest groups in deciding trade policy. Institutions and culture do matter, but only idiosyncratically....

Investing in Protection - A close-up

Gary Stuart

My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991.The first case involved...

Innocent Until Interrogated - In a nutshell

Philip E. Auerswald

I’d be delighted if a “just browsing” reader were to gravitate toward the last third of the book, because that’s really where I explore the implications of the story for...

The Code Economy - A close-up

Tony Whyton

In Jazz Icons, I argue that jazz history is now dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status.When musicians and fans discuss the life and music...

Jazz Icons - In a nutshell

Benjamin R. Cohen

Pure Adulteration is about the origins of manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book...

Pure Adulteration - In a nutshell

Henry M. Cowles

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 - In a nutshell

Mark Galeotti

Two aspects of my professional path led me to this book. I have been working on security studies, with a particular focus on Russia since before Russia was an independent...

The Weaponisation of Everything - The wide angle

Toby Talbot

This memoir is an inside account of the New Yorker Theater that my husband Dan and I opened on March 17, 1960. An Art Deco relief of Diana the Huntress...

The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies - In a nutshell

Eric A. Posner

International legal scholars have, with only a few exceptions, taken a largely uncritical approach to the international legal institutions that they study. Compliance with international law is taken for granted,...

The Perils of Global Legalism - The wide angle

Giorgio Bertellini

If the argument I make is fairly simple—even intuitive: like other media, cinema domesticated the alleged wilderness of remote places and populations into entertaining representations—executing it required familiarity with a...

Italy in Early American Cinema - The wide angle

Cliff Edwards

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

Mystery of the Night Café - A close-up

Federico Finchelstein

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

Transatlantic Fascism - The wide angle

Andrew Burstein

The discipline of history demands of professional historians that we do our best to re-encounter and faithfully restore to the modern mind the physical, moral, intellectual, social, political, emotional boundaries––the...

Democracy's Muse - The wide angle

Peter S. Wells

Ever since enrolling in a PhD-program in Economics, I have been troubled by the excessive abstraction whereby economists treat money. While past thinkers, from Aristotle and Plato to Karl Marx...

Barbarians to Angels - The wide angle

Yuval Feldman

The book attempts to bring together three related bodies of literature and make them speak to each other. The first one is behavioral economics. Through thousands of experiments, this literature...

The Law of Good People - The wide angle

Mary Anne Franks

I would hope that the reader would encounter the first pages of the preface first. They do not outline an argument or a political position but tell a personal story...

The Cult of the Constitution - A close-up

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

Deirdre Barrett

Niko Tinbergen clearly thought ethological principles applied to man. But while waxing eloquently for pages about bee-wasps and sticklebacks, he devoted the occasional sentence or two to man.The major push...

Supernormal Stimuli - The wide angle

Ruth DeFries

The book has separate chapters for each of the four strategies. My favorite chapter is the one about the fourth strategy, titled “One Size Fits No One.” It’s about how...

What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times - A close-up

Jerome Kagan

The Three Cultures compares the premises, vocabulary, sources of evidence, contributions, and limitations of the research, scholarship, and theories of natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists. The concepts of physicists,...

The Three Cultures - In a nutshell

Lynne Sagalyn

Power at Ground Zero tells the epic story of how the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan was rebuilt after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The destruction...