700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
My book is about that loosely defined cultural phenomenon known as “the recovery movement”—an agglomeration of self-help groups and practices that have grown out of Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding...
The book can be read like parts of a puzzle. Although some themes (education, history, progress, and national identity) permeate the entire book, one can start anywhere depending on one’s...
The book gives a manifold view of emerging Asian post-genomic science. Each chapter features scientists at work in an adjacent field, constantly challenged by the contingencies of making scientific wagers...
Examining how the actions of individuals come together to create an immense commercial empire, Dangerous Economies is studded with the stories of a diverse array of New Yorkers, from slaves...
One of the reasons Trucking Country appeals to general interest readers outside of the academy is my attention to the cultural history of trucking, particularly the Hollywood movies and Nashville...
The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was an internationally celebrated event, and was also the occasion for numerous proclamations, across the political spectrum, of a dawning unbordered world. Yet,...
On December 30, 2019, the Chinese scientist Jiankui He was sentenced to three years in jail and fined three million yuan. His crime? Creating the world’s first CRISPR-edited babies. My...
Once at a dinner party, when I described my book as being about the performative dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an attorney who was there quipped, “Well, that...
The History of Missed Opportunities explores an unrecognized, certainly an unappreciated, development in Romantic-era Britain: the discovery of everyday life as a world that had been overlooked or, as Maurice...
If you pick up Inventing Edward Lear in a bookstore, I hope you’ll turn to the pictures first. I would! Maybe you will be delighted by the imaginary enormous Hippopotamouse...
I would hope that “just browsing” readers in a bookstore would encounter the introductory section, “Horse,” or the penultimate chapter, “Dog” first. “Horse” for the simple fact that I try...
Is this what you would call a golden age of research?It's a combination of things. There has been a huge amount of excavation work and research over the past 150...
This isn’t the first book to make fictionality the primary variable in the history of the novel, though it does depart pretty radically from earlier attempts. That departure was unplanned....
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...
Household Gods is a history of the British love-affair with the domestic interior from the age of mass manufacture to modernism. In no other country was domesticity so celebrated and...
In Jazz Icons, I argue that jazz history is now dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status.When musicians and fans discuss the life and music...
International legal scholars have, with only a few exceptions, taken a largely uncritical approach to the international legal institutions that they study. Compliance with international law is taken for granted,...
Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of...
A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of...
The book offers, using a cartographic metaphor, a ‘map’ of wellbeing. In that respect, I don’t have a particular preference for which ‘region’ I would hope a reader first encounters....
This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...
I have spent my career studying the theories and practices of social movements, such as feminism and lgbt liberation. In every case, transformation in the emotional realm has been critical....
Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...
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...
I’ve developed an analytical framework in which politicians and bureaucrats mainly respond to demands from economic interest groups in deciding trade policy. Institutions and culture do matter, but only idiosyncratically....
The beginning of Chapter Two sets the stage for understanding what an unusual position Twain occupied at the end of his life.Due to his longevity, Twain had almost become a...
I have long been struck by how much and how deeply English borrows from French. My training was in French and English literature. My first book explored the literary and...
I expect the most controversial aspect of this book may be my acceptance of local, pastured, small farm meat.Part of the reason animal advocacy is so marginalized in American culture...
A casual browser could do worse than start around p.189, with the story of Oliver Smedley and Kitty Black’s raid on the Shivering Sands fort.Shivering Sands was an old World...
I hold that to be ignored and rejected by others means psychological death. Around page 225 in the book, I illustrate this idea by what I understand to be the...
What started as a contest for spices between Portugal and Spain had many consequences. It hugely expanded European understanding of the world and allowed people, through the resulting medium of...
I have been writing and teaching U.S. and world history for more than three decades, for 12 years at Cornell and then 17 years at Nebraska. I have been primarily...
The book explores the world of constitutional theocracies through six different lenses.First, I define constitutional theocracy and describe its basic tenets, functioning, and intrinsic existential tensions. These embedded disharmonies pose...
Fake It investigates a set of fictional literary and art forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations that range from the 1660s to the twenty-first century. In the prologue, I...
Thinking in Place is a collection of nine essays written over the last five years of moving around the world.Each essay is located in a place but sometimes the places...
This book defends the duty of judgment and the freedom to err. Against the modernist ambition to discover truth by the power of reason, and post-modernist flagellation of both truth...
Nearly half of Americans have suffered from mental illness at some point in their lives. One quarter has been mentally ill during the previous year. These figures come from the...
Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists...
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 City as Campus is concerned with how higher education is situated within urban environments.I explore how urban universities’ missions of service, teaching, and research have transformed over time—as they...
There are many inspirations for this book. I am a huge fan of hip-hop. Like most guys around my age, I tried my hand at breakdancing as a teen. I...
When did you last immerse yourself in a pool of make-believe? In a television drama, or a film, watched from the sofa or a cinema seat? A story you read...
I would want a reader who browses through my book to read pages 4 and 5 because they show in vivid terms the perils of thinking that veiling is faith...
If an idle browser were to thumb through my book, say in a bookshop somewhere, I would hope that Chapter 3 catches her eye. It contains a number of surprises,...
There are three broad forces occurring in society today that in concert are leading to these jobs becoming cool. First, how we classify taste is shifting. Consumers are questioning what...
As the title suggests, this book is about the personal and social relationships that govern the global economy. I wanted to tell a story of global finance that focuses not...
The Future of Change uncovers the relationships between advances in communications technologies and the rise and success of some of the iconic social movements over the course of American history.Advances...
The book draws on numerous theoretical and empirical paradigms. Perhaps foremost among these is the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), also popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This paradigm holds that...
One potential audience for On Tarzan is the American Studies classroom. Undergraduate scholars might enjoy the early discussion of the “juvenile” nature of the Tarzan narratives, the post-Darwin idea of...
There are hundreds of books about Le Corbusier’s architecture, but very little knowledge about the man himself. This book is an attempt to reveal Le Corbusier’s personality, his motivations, give...
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