700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
In many of the fiercest debates of our day—for example, about religion, government, family policy, health, even about personal relationships—people draw on vague notions of how things “used to be.”But...
Chapter 1 of Life After Privacy is an ideal first look for the average reader. This chapter examines our curious, conflicted relationship to privacy. We may say that privacy is...
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,...
In the media spotlight, ruthlessly dedicated Chinese students and their superb performance in international testing continue to fuel global interest in China’s education system. This, however, tells only a partial...
Urban theorists have tried for generations to define exactly what a neighborhood is. But behind that daunting existential question lies a much murkier problem: how do you make neighborhoods productive...
A reader who picked up The Known Citizen and opened it at random might come across social outrage over candid photographs in the late nineteenth century, prompting a spate of...
I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem.I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...
Today, the reading experience has been expanded to different formats and time frames. So I have divided each chapter into smaller sections that make a particular point about some aspect...
After five hundred years John Calvin remains the object of admiration and loathing. For some he is revered as the great reformer of the sixteenth century whose legacy embraces both...
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...
When I began graduate school in 1977, the history of science was mainly about theories. I had been drawn to the field by the work of Thomas Kuhn, whose famous...
Analog is about how we live our lives today—with digital technology. The book is about analog; but it is also about digital because both technological forms are inextricably conjoined in...
I would urge the reader to start with the Introduction, called Obsession, which provides a bird’s eye view of how silver has seduced investors and politicians throughout the ages, and...
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...
If one were to open Inventing Tomorrow somewhere, where should that be? If you are drawn to the big story and to the argument with modernism, read the Introduction. The...
Democracy’s Muse examines why it is that Thomas Jefferson has come to represent American ideals for all modern generations, why the most emotive figure of the founding era appeals to...
I wrote the Age of Addition to explain why addiction has become so widespread, conspicuous, and varied. When I entered the field in the 1970s, as a doctoral student studying...
The first chapter of the book is only 19 pages—but it provides a useful introduction the topic and complete overview of the book.The chapter first documents the magnitude of the...
As an art historian I have been especially interested in works of visual art that have played some significant part in public conversations about pressing issues. In an earlier book...
Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural...
My interest in the sounds of historical voices grew out of my earlier research on masculinity in the nineteenth century. Rooting through the archives of schools, military barracks and legislative...
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...
I hope browsing readers will feel the palpable connections between the revolutionary period of the Reformation and our own times. The Introduction and Conclusion would be the places to get...
Why have the obvious answers to life’s relentless questions been hard to recognize even by many atheists?The most serious obstacle to accepting science’s answers to the persistent questions is one...
The toughest part of any writing on Pakistan is the challenge of how to address the key question of Islam in the construction of Pakistan’s identity. The risk here is...
Is economics the key to everything or do we need to look for completely new ways of explaining what is going on in the world?By “economics” I mean the discipline...
My previous book, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, examined how modern European intellectuals thought about commerce. Writing it, I recognized that the way modern European...
For me, the most fascinating parts of this story took place outside the stores: in a stadium of college students cheering for capitalism, a theme park about free enterprise with...
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...
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...
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