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Morality's Muddy Waters - The wide angle

As an historian, everything I do is anchored in a concern with the past presented in what I hope is a lively narrative. In walking along that path in this...

George Cotkin

The Ecological Thought - In a nutshell

All life forms are interconnected. We share our DNA with chimps (98%) but also with daffodils (35%). We drive cars that burn crushed dinosaurs. The oxygen we breathe is the...

Timothy Morton

Empire for Liberty - In a nutshell

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...

Richard H. Immerman

Made in America - In a nutshell

Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past.The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial...

Claude S. Fischer

The Thirty Years War - A close-up

When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a...

Peter W. Wilson

Calvin - The wide angle

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

Bruce Gordon

The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law - A close-up

My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In...

Daniel Bodansky

Fractured Rebellion - The wide angle

Venice in the 1610s and 1620s was the first European state to undertake systematic surveillance of private individuals, and to entrust the supervision of such surveillance to a permanent committee,...

Andrew G. Walder

Relationscapes - In a nutshell

Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch,...

Erin Manning

On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper - The wide angle

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France.But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that...

Jack R. Censer

A Brave Vessel - In a nutshell

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

Hobson Woodward

Forbidden Fruit - In a nutshell

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...

Richard Ned Lebow

The Disappearance of Objects - In a nutshell

New York’s artists around 1960 were living in the shadows of the city’s deindustrialization—moving among demolition sites, abandoned factories, and decrepit hardware stores, while all around them new highways, sleek...

Joshua Shannon

Culinary Nostalgia - In a nutshell

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...

Mark Swislocki

Europe’s Promise - In a nutshell

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...

Steven Hill

The Essential Engineer - In a nutshell

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...

Henry Petroski

Italy in Early American Cinema - In a nutshell

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

Giorgio Bertellini

America's Army - In a nutshell

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over...

Beth Bailey

Helen of Troy - The wide angle

This book took me many years to write—longer than the Trojan War itself took. At Oxford University, where I teach, students study every period of English Literature from 800 CE...

Laurie Maguire

Mark Twain’s Other Woman - In a nutshell

An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910.Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place...

Laura Skandera Trombley

Lost to the Collective - In a nutshell

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences.Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...

Kenneth M. Pinnow

American Modernism and Depression Documentary - In a nutshell

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

Jeff Allred

The Urban Spectator - In a nutshell

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have...

Eric Gordon

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - In a nutshell

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

Moshik Temkin

Monument Wars - The wide angle

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

Kirk Savage

Angel of Vengeance - In a nutshell

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

Ana Siljak

The Conservatives - In a nutshell

“Conservative” means different things in different times and places. This book describes and explains the different types of conservatism in American history, from the Constitution to the end of the...

Patrick Allitt

1989 - In a nutshell

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions,...

Joshua Clover

Clash of Extremes - In a nutshell

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...

Marc Egnal

Le Corbusier and the Occult - The wide angle

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...

Jan Kenneth Birksted

2154 Micro-Interviews