700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
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...
Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...
One of the most compelling themes in contemporary art theory is the controversy surrounding the question of “medium specificity.” That is, whether or not anything but habit and convention determine...
Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company builds on the implications of my earlier work in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (1995). The focus is no longer on Duchamp alone but...
Giovanni Batista Belzoni was a towering figure at the beginning of archaeology in Egypt, not for his recognized talents but for his 6’6” height.Nearly 200 years later he is still...
In the introduction I draw some close parallels between baroque manipulation of appearances and the control exerted by the Bush administration over the news media. The use of the media...
I think I would like your browsing reader to come across “Chapter 4. Multitasking and the Metal Man: How Much Can Iron Man’s Mind Manage?” This chapter is important because...
I guess I’d direct a browsing reader to my last essay: any writer is always most interested in his or her current work.A colleague, Margaret Ferguson, observed over twenty years...
If someone were to flip casually through the pages of the book, I would hope that they would appreciate, and be intrigued by, its variety of illustrations.Of course I do...
This book is about the cultural connection between love and illness—a connection often referred to in the everyday use as “lovesickness” and all too often automatically assumed. As a specialist...
When I think of a browser in a bookstore, looking around, and happening upon my book, I hope it will spark curiosity, and they will wonder what is it? What...
Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...
What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...
Edward Bancroft was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1745 and died in England in 1821. He is most famous (or infamous) today because from 1777 to 1783 he lived in...
Clara Foltz was a leader of two great movements: for women’s rights and for public defense. The book conceptualizes these two as connected in her person as well as in...
I am not the first to suggest the end of nature. Close to two decades ago, Bill McKibben announced that climate change spells the empirical end of nature, and more...
To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I draw on a wide...
Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...
Around the turn of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and...
This is a literary biography of Helen of Troy. It is not a historical life of a Bronze Age princess or a study of mythology; it is not an account...
On page 343 one meets Frederick Willetts, the self-proclaimed Pirate King of Edwardian London. In the early years of the twentieth century, Willetts ran a “People’s Music Publishing Company” in...
The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists.The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...
In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...
Genetics in the Madhouse examines the study of human heredity historically, from the ground up. The gene eventually comes into the story, as anyone would expect, but in an odd...
“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...
[I recount the story of a shirtless Nabokov catching butterflies in the mountains of Utah in 1943 and responding only slowly to John Downey, a student stopped beside the coal...
I began researching Selling the American Way in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was very interested in determining how foreign audiences understood the United...
Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials....
If you think about some of the things that really define what it is to be human, the first one you’re going to go to is our intelligence. We have...
Life on Mars is a history book that is about the future. Mars is in our future, probably the very near future. What we already know and what we likely...
The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance,...
Fears of a Setting Sun tells the story of how most of the American founders came to feel deep anxiety, disappointment, and even despair about the government and the nation...
Inventing the Enemy is about the period known as the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. At the height of the terror in 1937–38, the Soviet secret police under the...
Much of Violence Taking Place appears to be dedicated to violence “over there,” apparently far away—politically if not geographically—from most readers in the Global North.But in one section of the...
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...
When I last flipped through Camps, I paused at three moments that give a sense of the range of possibilities, realities, and complexities in the book. Each stopping point includes...
A Dream Interpreted within a Dream grapples with the allusive and elusive place dreaming occupies in the panorama of human experience. Drawing on a variety of contemporary academic disciplines, I...
We tend to assume that freedom of speechnaturally accompanies other democratic rights. But the construction of the virtual and physical spaces where modern individuals could publicly and freely use their...
The second chapter of the book provides a broad historical account of the importance of the Anglo-American trial and the fierceness with which the Founding Fathers defended it. The story...
Peace on Our Terms recounts the dramatic story of female activism around the world during a single, remarkable year in history, 1919, when the bloodshed of World War I finally...
Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist...
When we encounter the state, we do not meet with the text of the law but with a particular person – a case manager at a welfare office, a frontline...
Selling the American Way is about the ways that the U.S. government defined and disseminated official narratives about American society, politics, and culture during the early Cold War. Using radio...
Modernist America is a history of American culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on literature, painting, architecture, advertising and design, classical music, jazz, Broadway musicals, movies,...
During the recent Olympic Games a common cliché was to talk about China’s “coming out party,” meaning that China was finally opening out to the world. The key point of...
Radical Thinking is a book about how we make sense of the world, and how we can make more sense of it. But it’s not a typical ‘critical thinking’ book. It’s ‘radical’ (from the Latin radic, meaning ‘root’) because it’s about the roots - the foundations - of what we think. In other words, it’s about the things that shape our thoughts...
As of 2010, perhaps more than half of the world’s population lives in polities where religion not only has remained public but also has been playing a key role in...
The modern history of the Jews is deeply intertwined with the history of capitalism. My book tries, in a brief compass, to show the many facets of this relationship.The way...
The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was...
9/11 was one of the most photographed events in history, and in the years that followed numerous films investigated, profiled and sought to understand what happened on that day and...
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!
