700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...
If a reader happened upon the book in a bookstore, I’d hope they would read the first pages of the introduction, which explains why I came to do the book;...
This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No,...
Animal Ethics in Context attempts to offer something both to theoretical debates in animal ethics and to more practical concerns about animal treatment.Theoretically, animal ethicists have focused on the importance...
In addition to my new interpretation of Japanese sexology and sex practices in Asia, the three middle chapters of the book focus on the most commercially popular of Japan’s mass...
True Sex discusses the lives of eighteen individuals who were assigned female at birth but who lived as male in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. By...
The topic of this book is connected to everything! (Okay, maybe not directly to geology or health insurance. But to a gazillion other things that matter.) It’s connected to the...
This is my fourth, and by far my broadest, examination of modern American culture.My first two books focused almost exclusively on American culture. The first, Radical Visions and American Dreams,...
I began my academic career as an art historian exploring Napoleon’s art theft in Europe and the ensuing trauma of what I came to refer to as translocation. Whereas Napoleon...
Although I hesitated to put a Harlem image on the cover of Slumming, precisely because I wanted to challenge the almost exclusive association of that neighborhood with my book’s topic,...
I found Jean Wade Rindlaub’s archive at the Schlesinger Library in the course of researching my first book, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table. In that book...
Although I purposefully avoided paying excessive attention to computers, the internet and social media, I think that there is a strong and helpful analysis of those things in my book.One...
The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive...
My favorite pages in the book are pages 58 to 64, the subheading titled “Imaging the Future” in which I describe how Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner and...
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...
The first two chapters of the book propose a completely new reading of this period. I don’t believe that things drop from heaven. That all of a sudden one caliph...
Once Before Time explores questions about the nature of time and space, and whether or not they have a definite beginning.Developments in physical theories (General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and attempts...
Many of the same Americans who believe in the Easter bunny also think that public opinion is a significant force in political life. Perhaps, not all would accept James Bryce’s...
In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...
I would hope that a casual reader would see the essays on hysteria and photography in the first section, and then the essays on photography and historical consciousness in the...
Hegel is not a very agreeable philosopher—that much can probably be agreed upon. But the very fact that he has come to stand both for the cold imperialism of an...
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported in December 2009 that the murder rate fell by 10 percent in the United States during the first six months of 2009. That was...
Film and literature play a central role in the restitution debate of the 1970s, opening a space for political imagination. Many African filmmakers trained in former large colonial cities, where...
This book attempts to place hate speech into a context of long lineage.While hate speech has almost undoubtedly been around for as long as people have been able to recognize...
Supernormal Stimuli explains how our once-helpful instincts get hijacked in our garish modern world. Instincts for food, sex, or territorial protection evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago—not...
In Battling Pornography, I locate the roots of anti-pornography sentiment in a series of interrelated social and political conditions that shaped women’s lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s....
I feel like I should say that the chapter I would want people to read if they picked the book up in the store and opened it up to a...
Between 1792 and 1812, about 30,000 Americans left the republic to seek land in Upper Canada. They became known as the “Late Loyalists,” but most were just looking for the...
We have come to understand that all the matter we have ever observed is made of a scant hundred chemical elements. The past century has shown that the atomic elements...
Many blue-collar, manual labor, and service jobs that were once low-status have become “cool” in today’s economy. In fact, jobs like bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher have gone from providing...
The book is intended to be a primer on copying: each chapter examines some aspect of copying, from the core philosophical issue as to what a copy is, the history...
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...
I have had two careers and this book meets at their intersection. As a Village Voice and Spin rock critic and editor, I came in at the end of the...
When browsing for a book, I enjoy employing Ford Madox Ford’s “page 99” test. An English literary critic and novelist, Ford wrote in the 1920s, “Open the book to page...
Discussions about migration in the media and elsewhere are limited by a lack of perspective of international migration’s historical role, contemporary impacts, and future prospects. Exceptional People addresses these gaps....
Willkie’s trip around the world is at the heart of The Idealist. The journey is unjustly forgotten today, but at the time it was heralded as a major political event....
I guess I’d like readers to skip the introduction and prologue and go right to the first chapter. In it I recount discussing Herman Melville’s great tome, Moby-Dick, two chapters...
The reverence Americans profess for the Constitution is all too often a selective and self-serving devotion. Constitutional fundamentalists, as I call them, treat the Constitution the way that religious fundamentalists...
Mathematics in Ten Lessons is intended for an audience of humanists, where humanist is interpreted in the wide sense to mean anyone in the humanities. But, because of the way...
In this book I grapple with a problem: Is human development directional? Does human evolution move in a particular direction? In recent decades the dominant view in the various sciences...
It might come as a bit of a surprise that there is so much in the book about friendship. Perhaps because I know so little, I find some of the...
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...
While the paradigm frequently offered for understanding our society is freedom of the market, the reality of most people’s experience of economic life is one of constraint. Why is this?It...
I love the question about what I’d want a “just-browsing” reader to encounter first, because it’s imagining a reader who hasn’t yet gotten into the book’s “story.” They’re just trying...
They say not to judge a book by its cover or by the images contained within it. I have to say, however, I spent a lot of time thinking about...
The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney explores the extraordinary depth of Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration – and how Cheney built that influence.Cheney’s role was so pervasive in policy...
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...
The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...
This is not just a political story, because that only tells part of what is fascinating about France in this period. What are the images we have of France in...
A basic point of both curiosity and frustration that motivated me to write the book is the difference between rules in the rule-book and what happens in practice. In theory,...
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