700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The aspect of my research which took me most by surprise happened half-way through my writing of the book. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for all his stunning complexity, notoriously dismissed...
My book examines how and why East Asia is so often associated with technology and futurity in contemporary Hollywood film. Examples I discuss include the dystopic cities of Blade Runner,...
There are two sections that I hope browsers would encounter. The first is from a section at the beginning called the Year of Two Presidents. It is a fictional vignette...
A few years ago, I heard a speaker from a large retail chain give an impassioned presentation about what his firm was doing for sustainability. He told us about “dumpster...
All societies engage in myth-making about their pasts. The tales speak to the image that they wish to project not only to an external world but to themselves. How far...
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...
One of the highlights of the book, I think, comes in the chapter on Jefferson and slavery. The Missouri crisis of 1819-21, which revolved around whether Missouri would be admitted...
Recomposing Ecopoetics examines 21st-century poetry by a dozen Americans and Canadians who are engaging in their poems with the environmental challenges we currently face. It is, then, a work of...
An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910.Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place...
Emancipation After Hegel provides an introduction to Hegel that reimagines Hegel’s project and at the same time engages in contemporary political debates. When I started thinking about the book, I...
While Macbeth may not fit neatly into the category of a “race” play, like a specter it is nevertheless haunted by, and haunts, the language and performances of race.Othello, in...
Corruption has existed since the earliest civilizations but documenting and writing its history has not been easy. In the case of Peru, tackling through detailed research the challenges to writing...
Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...
I hope readers would start with the first few pages of the book. In the introduction, I recount the story of how the American Legion advocated for passage of the...
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...
Scholars of book history and early modern English literature have long affirmed and debated the impact of printing technology on culture. They often invoke exemplary claims and concepts, such as...
Venice in the 1610s and 1620s was the first European state to undertake systematic surveillance of private individuals, and to entrust the supervision of such surveillance to a permanent committee,...
This book is about understanding how schools influence achievement gaps. The traditional story is that schools are part of the problem and that large differences in school quality make achievement...
This book began with a question about all the installation art and performance that I was seeing in the early 2000s in New York galleries and museums, wondering where this...
Not Exactly Lying stands apart from the flood of recent writing on the phenomena of misinformation, disinformation, and journalistic deception. Donald Trump did not, as he claimed, invent the term...
The book’s eight chapters address the key dimensions associated with the history of the European Enion. Did the predecessors of today’s EU really create peace after the Second World War,...
I think that Chapter 4 on ‘humans and things’ would be the best starting place. This is because it is here that I explore the ways in which it is...
The standard view of medicine holds that observant clinicians discover diseases in nature. Accordingly, psychiatrists are no different from other doctors. They, too, discern forms of pathology arising from dysfunctions...
I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by straightforward institutional or policy reforms.In fact, there are...
On one level, Program Earth covers a wide range of topics, from forests and webcams to migration and climate change, garbage patches in oceans and air pollution in urban areas,...
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...
Under the Hammer begins by looking outward to non-Western practice, but very quickly turns inward to my own culture.I begin with the experience of horror the world shared as the...
The Mirror and the Mind traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test—the experiment of placing subjects in front of a mirror and looking for signs of self-recognition—showing how it...
This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace.Could you...
The first two chapters set the stage for understanding how beauty comes to be in the brain of the beholder. I begin Chapter 1 by asking a simple question: Why...
What I wanted to do in Political Affect was write a book on advances in the sciences that would use a continental figure (Deleuze) as part of its theoretical basis,...
The search for the origins of the barricade and attempts to identify the key moments in its evolution led me to some surprising conclusions.For example, it has long been accepted...
The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...
The introduction is a fruitful place to meander and to get a sense of the book. It covers a lot of ground. It also provides a short, traditional overview of...
I would be happy if readers opened Chapter 3, “Beginnings.” Here I tell a family story and a national story as a prelude to the story of Thorstein Veblen as...
While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...
Several principles shape the book. First, the story of the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath is told with a focus on individuals. Readers will encounter lawmaker Thaddeus...
This book offers intimate, personal stories, but they are connected to a wider trajectory of our country over the last sixty years. My own coming of age in the 1960s...
Probably the last page in the book is the most important to me.One of my main purposes was to show how many people were killed—starved, gassed, shot—in the Bloodlands between...
At its heart this book is about scientific discovery and the risks inherent in sharing new ideas. It focuses on the scientific revolution in Europe during the 16th and 17th...
If historians don’t try to explain why the world has turned out the way it has, they are falling down on the job. Yet academic historians often have trouble seeing...
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...
Orderly Anarchy places the Indians of California in modern evolutionary perspective. It disputes the traditional, stage by stage, cultural evolutionary interpretation in which hunter-gatherers represent a primitive, unevolved stage of...
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...
A central argument of my book is that the modernist element within Depression documentary was not merely aesthetic but intimately related to the turbulent politics of the Depression era. Perhaps...
Global California addresses how the citizens of a megastate with the dimensions and power of a nation are affected by international trends and challenges, and what they can do, within...
We have all heard that we’re about to become obsolete, irrelevant. Or if not us, then, certainly, our children. No number of coding camps will help them. And definitely not...
What if someone could commit you to an insane asylum for life with a simple signature? Or send your children to live with strangers? Or fire you from your job...
If a reader were just dipping into the book, I hope that he or she might first browse the fourth chapter.Against all odds, Craddock went about her work as a...
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...
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