700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
In the immediate post-war period, the work of the cybernetician Grey Walter picked up on earlier critiques of the mirror test. Walter had built a cybernetic “tortoise,” a simple robot...
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 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...
Typically, the origins of modern Hinduism are traced to a single place, a decisive moment, and a compelling religious figure. The place is Bengal or, to be more specific, Calcutta....
I did not write this book to “debunk” the lie detector. Eminent psychologists have been trying to do that for eighty years, ever since interrogators first re-purposed some basic physiological...
As a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, I recall walking around the city’s downtown at the time and thinking how much of the central city around me –...
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...
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...
Mystery of the Night Café not only seeks to solve the mystery of Van Gogh’s deepest sense of life, a sense that has attracted many around the globe, but it...
Sometimes a book like mine makes people feel that, if they don’t know the films or novels or cases written about, they can’t read a given chapter or judge its...
Over the past couple of decades, scholars have begun to investigate the social construction of race and sexuality in the United States. Noting the absence of any fixed biological or...
Given the declining number of new drugs, and the crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, many are asking what can be done.The Obama administration has proposed a new initiative to help...
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...
The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists.The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...
I began exploring the relationship between schools and inequality after reading the 1992 article entitled “Summer Setback” by Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander. The authors showed that gaps in math...
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...
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...
The Word on the Streets enters in a rather thorny place in modernist studies. In my mind—and I make the claim in the book—the field of modernist studies has been...
Over the last 15 years, the annual number of approved new drugs has been declining dramatically. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry, as well as academic and government researchers, have dramatically increased...
Age of Fracture began in my attempts to explain modern America to myself and to my students. Having made a pledge that I would take my courses right up to...
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...
Memory Trauma and History intersects with the history of medicine, with trauma studies and psychoanalysis, with questions concerning postmodernism and politics, and with issues concerning photography and historical consciousness.The final...
I have long believed that city building is a story of implementation for which plans are but the foundation for debate and action, and that action is driven by politics,...
The Conservative Turn is an intellectual history of American anti-communism told through the biographies of two intellectuals, Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who met as Columbia undergraduates in the 1920s.Both...
My career has focused on bridging the gap between the estranged cultures of the humanities and sciences. How can we use science to better understand fiction? And what can scientists...
My big question is: Why do people stay with lives, forms, and fantasies of life that don’t work?How do we learn to associate certain things with our fantasies of the...
Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character...
There are different explanations of why the Cold War ended. What is distinctive about your interpretation of it?The two most popular explanations are that the Cold War ended when it...
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...
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...
Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon is about the real history of art. Most books on art history are written from the point of view of the author…
During the recent Olympic Games a common cliché was to talk about China’s “coming out party,” meaning that China was finally opening out to the world. The key point of...
I describe my experiences and observations over a career that has grown parallel to a field of scientific and practical interest that has grown from raw data collection to its...
Memos from the Besieged City is a series of “reports” to and about certain cultural ancestors whose work has defined cultural traditions and practices in the humanities and human sciences.The...
The book examines Israeli culture in the 1990s between the two popular Palestinian uprisings, the intifadas, in 1987 and 2000, respectively. By looking at popular media and literature, I highlight...
There is no more controversial aspect of Calvin’s life than the execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva in the fall of 1553, an event I treat on pages 217-228, in...
Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from...
Good Vibrations is written so that readers can open it anywhere and immediately find something that speaks to them. You can simply turn to a chapter that connects with what matters to you right now: perhaps the sections about emotional wellbeing, stress reduction, and resilience; or those about ...
The Austrian-American novelist Vicki Baum once wrote that what people have done to rubber is fascinating, but what is more fascinating yet is what rubber has done to people. That,...
It is difficult to crack open this book to a particular page and get a strong sense of the whole. Individual chapters highlight the activism of varying groups of women...
Named after Charles David Keeling, a distinguished carbon-cycle scientist, the carbon atom Dave serves, I hope, as a literary device that aids in revealing the fascinating paths that actual carbon...
What does the battlefield in this information war look like? What weapons are being used on social media?Let me focus on social media, particularly, the Russian interference in the 2016...
In my first job as a lawyer, I represented several people who had spent years behind bars but were exonerated by DNA tests, including people who had falsely confessed, like...
This book addresses precisely the questions raised by its title.We all know that banks fail when they can’t pay their debts on time. This book spells out the specific steps...
We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...
I have always been interested in applying the techniques of archaeology to understand peoples who were described by others but who left no written record themselves. Julius Caesar’s descriptions of...
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...
That the concerns which Republic, Leviathan, and the Communist Manifesto address are of perennial importance is not in doubt. I first encountered the three books as a student more than...
This book is an effort at the “quest for the historical Muhammad” that uses methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical and early Christian studies to investigate the beginnings of Islam....
One big question inevitably raised by Anglo-American history is why, given the Framers’ expansive views of impeachment, it has so seldom been employed against American presidents, and why it seems...
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!
.png)
