700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The Singing Turk explores the huge cultural phenomenon of European operas about Turks, flourishing especially during the eighteenth century, in the European age of Enlightenment. Though most people interested in...
The idea that the meaning of art may not be exhausted by its visual manifestations and the desire to look is examined as a response to the pressures of commodification...
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...
History and social science largely rest on Humean causation: the belief in causes that can be established by something approaching a constant conjunction between two events, one envisaged as a...
Even as shooting wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, and may yet be sparked over Taiwan, there is much talk about the ways in which modern states face...
This book is about the ways that cinema teaches us how the idea of occupying the position of the victim is central to the dynamics of terrorism.I became interested in...
Animal exploitation is rampant in American culture today. In factory farms, shelters, zoos, puppy mills, science labs, and many other sites, animals are often treated as senseless commodities. Loving Animals...
The spatial requirements and landscape consequences of the automobile age – the roads, oil and gas refineries and stations, garages, tire and parts stores and junk yards, billboards and flashing...
The black-and-white photograph shows a group of professional women posing in front of a brand-new dormitory. The year is 1928. It is a cold day. The women are bundled in...
There’s been a lot of discussion of “cultural appropriation” in our culture recently—this is obviously a perennial topic but it seems to be a particularly charged subject in the current...
One of the most revered buildings in Chicago’s architectural history is also one of the strangest. Looming over the intersection of Dearborn and Jackson Streets, Burnham’s and Root’s Monadnock building,...
I would suggest that your browser first reads the book jacket’s summary. That should give an idea of what the book is all about.After that, it’s a toss up between...
There are two quite different aspects of the work to which I would want to draw a reader’s attention. The first aspect is what most of the book is about;...
In 1954, Egypt’s new revolutionary regime arrested Sayyid Qutb and hundreds of other Egyptian Islamist following a Muslim Brother’s assassination attempt on President Nasser. Qutb had joined the Muslim Brotherhood,...
This book examines how many policy research organizations, like think tanks, have transformed from non-partisan information producers into partisan allies pursuing ideological policy goals. Most policymaking today is structured by...
In a letter of June 29, 1940, Max Horkheimer eloquently developed one of the metaphors that became central to the history of Critical Theory in America. Writing to the actress...
Organic farming is inspired by visions of harmony between human beings and the natural world. These days, however, many people who reflect about organic foods think instead of struggle.Activists and...
Breaking the Devil’s Pact<strong id=""> </strong>is a case study of the 22+ years of effort on part of federal prosecutors, federal judges and court-appointed monitors to purge organized crime influence...
The book relates to the changing nature of terrorism and how different groups are either being forced or recruited into these deadly organizations.I address several underlying theories about the nature...
There are two episodes, in chapters two and seven, that I hope will reward the patience of the reader. Two duels, one in 1880 and the other in 1894, mark...
I would hope that the bookstore browser would look at the introduction. It sums up what the book is about. I would also recommend the chapters on holidays, on the...
Albert Gallatin contributed as fully as any other statesman to the welfare and independence of the young United States, yet he has been largely forgotten by history.Born in Geneva in...
Into the Extreme offers an unusual look into the vast domain of U.S. human spaceflight. I wrote it after doing years of fieldwork in its workplaces that are off-limits to...
The Bond franchise is the longest, and most profitable, film franchise in the history of motion pictures. Audiences accept the financial success of Bond’s films in much the same way...
Browsing readers might try Chapter 5, “God’s Urban Hothouse.” Anyone doubtful about religiosity in early and mid-twentieth-century Manhattan might profitably turn to this chapter, which describes Manhattan as a modern...
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...
The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...
Children love stories, and they love pretend play. And developmental psychologists have discovered extraordinary things about the growth of children’s minds. Very young children learn to understand other minds in...
I use a number of lenses on cocaine’s history, but one revealing close-up concerns the actual “technology” of cocaine making.Usually, the history of cocaine departs from the heroics of modern...
Two chapters might provide some real surprises to readers.Chapter five deals with activist networks. Today, networks are a common feature of the political landscape. Non-governmental organisations, labour unions, social movements,...
I would probably draw my reader’s attention to a chart on p. 231 that I initially made when I got the intuition that “human rights” were far more important in...
Orderly Anarchy is about hunter-gatherer California specifically but has three broader theoretical implications.The first is that self-interest is central to much of the human evolutionary trajectory. This becomes clear if...
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 have tried to make this investigation extremely wide. The rarity of documented female rulers in large, well-organized states makes it necessary to find them wherever one can, and as...
I wrote The Gulf Stream for the science and history enthusiasts as much as for those wishing an introduction to one of the last vestiges of wilderness on Earth.In pages...
At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...
Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...
By following the mirror through a range of historical contexts, The Mirror and the Mind offers a new way of understanding the history of psychology. While the standard history of...
I think the prologue does a particularly good job of depicting why people seek evaluation, how they feel during it, and most crucially, what can go wrong in the delivery...
While The Quantum Frontier is not a single-topic book, perhaps no question has received as much attention as that of the enigmatic Higgs boson. This undiscovered particle is always mentioned...
For Keeler’s placebo strategy to succeed—both for him to sell his services and to make the lie detector effective—he had to drum up publicity. Hence, my book zooms in on...
At the root of this project lay my interest in honeymoon suites. But the more I read about the general origins of honeymooning in North America, the less it made...
Fantasies of Neglect is at once a work of cultural criticism and an account of changing ideas of childhood, parenting, and the urban from the 1930s to the present. It...
If science made you an atheist, you are ready for serious scientific answers to the rest of life’s persistent questions.Here is a list of most of these questions and their...
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty emerges from several decades of politically engaged scholarship.I am a political theorist by vocation, which means that my thinking about the world is refracted through my...
Knowledgeable observers suggest that, just as physics shaped the twentieth century for both good (space flight) and ill (atomic bombs), so biology will shape the twenty-first century. As with physics...
I suppose, being a university professor dripping with awards and prizes, that I have played the schooling game well. But I was never sure what sense it all made. Why...
In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church in Los Angeles was suing for the return...
Fashioning Faces begins with the assumption that cultural history as an approach and a methodology can capture a cultural phenomenon such as the Romantic fascination with biography and portraiture more...
One of the most intriguing visual elements of Manhood Factories is the extensive reproduction of postcards from the more than 10,000 items preserved in the Cliff Smith YMCA Postcard Collection...
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