700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Is mass violence justified if it brings about a better world? This question has been raised frequently in relation to communism, as crimes of Stalin and Mao exposed the murderous...
The opening image of the book may take some readers by surprise: it does not include America at all because it was drawn before Europeans “discovered” the western hemisphere. After...
Foreignness: how have Americans thought about it? Who are we, who are they, and how are we related to each other? These questions have underpinned all of American history, as...
The argument of Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience rests on two claims about the importance of religious liberty to our broader constitutional tradition. First, of all the rights we possess, the...
The part of the research for The Food Axis that I found most intriguing and unfamiliar came from women’s records of homesteading on the frontier.When households traveled from settled parts...
While most of my book is about the TRC as performance rather than artistic performances about the TRC, the final chapter returns to the aesthetic realm by examining Philip Miller’s...
In Germany, protest politics takes place within the context of a stable democratic system. Democracy provides for voting, lobbying, and other routine methods for citizens to try to influence government....
One of my favorite moments in the book—and in researching it—appears on pages 97-98. On Tuesday, May 21, 1940, FDR had summoned his attorney general, Robert H. Jackson, to the...
Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...
64% of the US population — which includes the middle class — has a high school education or less, a pattern also found in the UK and EU countries. This...
So that we might learn what it means to remember one facet of our cultural legacy, we include in the book some two dozen concise essays addressing everything from Frederick...
I began writing this book when I was nine months pregnant. Having just completed a fellowship as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton I returned to...
Mysteries of Sex invites the reader to suspend the belief that men are men and women are women and explore two intertwined phenomena. The book asks first of all just...
From the first time I tried to read Hegel, I remember how intimidating I found his language and yet how enticing his ideas were to me. As a result, I...
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...
The book’s title is drawn from a late nineteenth century case—which is also the focus of the second chapter.Four men were shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic. After over three weeks at...
The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...
For more than a generation, the conservative counterrevolution in America blurred the distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the all-powerful hand of God. In the “culture wars”...
One of the remarkable observations detailed in this book is how hearing involves more than the ear. Our senses operate in such a way that there is an intertwining between...
Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago...
Sustainability is all the rage. Political and business leaders talk earnestly and passionately about going green. A growing number of books, movies, and public conversations signal a general unease about...
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...
The book begins with a story that took place during the Civil War. In 1862, the cost of the war forced the government to abandon the gold standard. The “greenback,”...
If you, the reader, were thumbing through Making Monsters in a bookstore, I hope that you would first glance at the preface, which begins with the testimony of a man...
In my book Bombshell: Women and TerrorismI examine the changing nature of terrorism.The face of terrorism is changing—and it is now often a woman’s face. No longer can we expect...
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...
The Last Utopia assesses how deeply rooted in history the notion of “international human rights” is.I have long been fascinated by this question since human rights—together with the advocacy and...
For the average movie goer who thinks of James Bond as the secret agent with the gadgets, I would suggest Chapter 11 “Gadgets” This chapter works through Bond’s equipment film...
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...
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “in all essential respects, the animal is absolutely identical with us… The difference lies merely in the accident, the intellect, not in the...
In the 1870s, Mathilde Weil volunteered to secure advertising for a German society paper owned by the brother of her friend. Although the advertising manager could not offer any advertising...
One of the chapters in Embodied Visions, “Love and Desire in the Cinema,” deals with romantic films and pornography. The motivation for writing it was that the dominant constructivist film...
The book addresses broad questions of American national identity. Who are we as a nation: selfish individualists or citizens and members of a commonwealth? Can America be a nation with...
Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...
I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...
In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...
In the fourth chapter, “Palestinian Spokesmen,” I discuss little-known dimensions of two famous Palestinian writers: Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. While Darwish is best known for his poetry and Kanafani...
p>To those who do not have the time to peruse the book from cover to cover, I would recommend reading chapter five, which looks at windows and glass architecture in...
A brief look at the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the “everyday” (as opposed to the “ordinary” which was primarily a class designation) developed into a necessary descriptor sometime in...
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...
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...
Are human beings innately violent? And when scientists give us an answer to this question, should we believe them? Killer Instinct is a history of debates about human nature. My...
At its core, Psychopathy Unmasked is a work of skepticism. Psychopathy is unquestionably one of the most culturally captivating mental health diagnoses. It pervades crime thrillers and true-crime narratives, making...
Chapter eight, ‘Imagination and creativity in markets’, begins by analysing the nature of imagination and its relationship to reason. Imagination receives strangely little attention in most of modern academia in...
For a long time, the field of environmental ethics has been dominated by non-anthropocentrism, i.e., the belief that nature has intrinsic value and that we have powerful duties to promote...
Thanks to extraordinarily rich archives, the reader can get much closer to every aspect of life and death during Mao’s Great Famine than ever before. But nothing illustrates the desperation...
Lenin’s Brother tells the tragic story of a brilliant young scientist and his turn to terrorism, and the history of the family that his actions devastated.During his senior year at...
Chapter 4, “From Market Share to Mindshare,” is about the new discipline of neuromarketing. The ability to monitor consumers’ biological responses to commercials in real time has led to more...
The story of William Mumler and the birth of spirit photography offer one of the most fascinating and haunting chapters in the history of the medium. In the 1860s, this...
The book is organized thematically in four chapters on different kinds of “dissident practices:” Political Practices, Discursive Practices, Transgressive Practices, and Practices of the Self. The selection of the artists...
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