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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...

Violence Taking Place - In a nutshell

Robert Engelman

I like a book that tells you what it’s about on the very first page. Mine does—in fact on a page numbered with a roman numeral. Open it up to...

More - A close-up

Michael S. Neiberg

I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem.I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...

Dance of the Furies - The wide angle

Giorgio Bertellini

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...

Italy in Early American Cinema - In a nutshell

Enda Duffy

The Speed Handbook is first and foremost devoted to exploring the thrill you feel when you experience intense new speeds.Of what, exactly does the thrill of speed consist? Can speed’s...

The Speed Handbook - In a nutshell

David T. Courtwright

Vice and addiction have always been with us. The Age of Addiction shows how entrepreneurs melded vices and addictions into a global economic system of limbic capitalism, outmaneuvering reformers determined...

The Age of Addiction - In a nutshell

Mark Galeotti

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...

The Weaponisation of Everything - In a nutshell

Susan D. Blum

I have to confess that I like this book. I poured my heart and soul into each page. I lived with the ideas and the sentences and the chunks for...

“I Love Learning; I Hate School” - A close-up

Lynn Meskell

While it is true that UNESCO status bestows a level of international prestige upon ancient sites, for archaeology as a discipline the organization means very little. World Heritage might offer...

A Future in Ruins - The wide angle

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican...

Mainland Passage - In a nutshell

Jeannie Suk

At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a...

At Home in the Law - In a nutshell

Susan Schulten

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...

A History of America in 100 Maps - A close-up

Youssef Cassis

How far have bankers been held responsible for the outbreak of financial crises? Charles Baring, the first Lord Revelstoke, the firm’s senior partner, took the brunt of the Baring Crisis...

Crises and Opportunities - A close-up

Peter T. Leeson

At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...

WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird - A close-up

Moshik Temkin

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - In a nutshell

Peter Laufer

Calexico takes the reader to a border unlike the stereotypes.The lawlessness of some border flashpoints dominates border news. The bulk of Americans, those of us living far from the 2,000...

Calexico - In a nutshell

Kirsten Fermaglich

Despite the prevalence of name changing in American Jewish culture, few historians have studied the actual practice of name changing in the United States. A Rosenberg by Any Other Name...

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name - In a nutshell

Geoffrey Heal

Environmental conservation is essential to a prosperous, healthy lifestyle. It is a necessity and not a luxury. We are part of the environment: we evolved with nature and depend on...

Endangered Economies - In a nutshell

Robert Bartlett

Most countries in medieval Europe were monarchies, ruled by a royal or imperial family, a dynasty, so politics at the top level was shaped by the births, marriages, and deaths...

Blood Royal - In a nutshell

Geoffrey Jones

There is no doubt in my mind that the place to start with this book is the illustrations. _Beauty Imagined _ includes over thirty color plates, and others in black...

Beauty Imagined - A close-up

David Scheffer

Leadership impunity for the commission of atrocity crimes is on the losing side of history now.To understand why the highest political and military leaders are increasingly at risk of indictment...

All the Missing Souls - In a nutshell

Kirk Savage

The monumental core of Washington, D.C. is a great axis of public space, almost two miles long, stretching from the Grant Memorial below the U.S. Capitol building to the Lincoln...

Monument Wars - In a nutshell

Craig Stanford

My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...

The New Chimpanzee - The wide angle

Ian Almond

This book is about the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight major German thinkers, but differs from other histories of ideas on two points. First of...

The History of Islam in German Thought - In a nutshell

Robert Wuthnow

One of the best examples of how the heartland is changing can be found near Kansas City, in Johnson County, where builders are putting together new housing developments and constructing...

Remaking the Heartland - A close-up

Jack N. Rakove

I am a linear writer as well as a linear reader (though in suspenseful novels I sometimes look ahead and then get mad at myself for hitting upon some spoiler...

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience - A close-up

Joshua Shannon

I came to this topic as an art historian, trying to make sense of some art I really liked but couldn’t understand or explain. As I looked at the art...

The Disappearance of Objects - The wide angle

Craig Jeffrey

The book considers issues of class, politics and waiting through reference to a lower middle class of Jats in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, especially students from this caste studying in...

Timepass - The wide angle

Susan L. Marquis

Although this effort began in Florida’s tomato fields, the Coalition and the Fair Food Program are providing a model for worker-driven social responsibility that could transform American agriculture, with potential...

I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won - The wide angle

Paula Lupkin

The American Young Men’s Christian Association, which began as a Protestant evangelical voluntary association in the 1850s, built hundreds of buildings in the years between the Civil War and the...

Manhood Factories - The wide angle

Eli Berman

Why are the Taliban such a threat in Afghanistan? And why are violent radical Islamists such resilient terrorists? You won’t believe this but the answer is communism. I’m not kidding....

Radical, Religious, and Violent - In a nutshell

Anne Dunlop

Painted Palaces is essentially an argument against a tenacious idea in art history – that one day around 1500, artists woke up, threw off the oppression of religion, and invented...

Painted Palaces - In a nutshell

Carol Becker

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...

Thinking in Place - In a nutshell

Gregory Hickok

In its broadest scope, the book addresses the age-old mind-body problem: how does the 3-pound hunk of meat in our heads give rise to our ability to perceive the world, understand it, and act within it successfully? Although this problem falls under the broad umbrella of cognitive neuroscience, language is a unique testbed in that it involves many aspects of cognition within ...

Wired for Words - The wide angle

Lewis H. Siegelbaum

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...

Cars for Comrades - A close-up

Eric Ames

One aspect of the book will be of particular interest to American readers: the history of Wild West shows in Germany. The story of Buffalo Bill, his Wild West, and...

Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments - A close-up

Joan Wallach Scott

If a reader happened upon the book in a bookstore, I’d hope they would read the first pages of the introduction, which explains why I came to do the book;...

On the Judgment of History - A close-up

Kathryn Allamong Jacob

Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in...

King of the Lobby - The wide angle

Dean Keith Simonton

The marketing people at MIT Press asked me to pick out a brief excerpt from the book that might provide the best entry. I answered that the four-page Prologue would...

The Genius Checklist - A close-up

Joe Roman

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

Ecological economics

Ayelet Shachar

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...

The Birthright Lottery - The wide angle

Kiran K. Patel

Project Europe offers a radically different interpretation of the European Union’s history. It shifts the focus away from the motives and driving forces of European integration to the concrete effects...

Project Europe - In a nutshell

Jerome Kagan

The birth of this manuscript was the need for a summer writing project married to the accidental spotting of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures near the shelf where I was...

The Three Cultures - The wide angle

John R. Ehrenfeld

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...

Sustainability by Design - A close-up

Thomas N. Bisson

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century was conceived in 1987 when, upon moving from Berkeley to Harvard, I was invited to offer a course in Harvard’s undergraduate core curriculum. I...

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century - The wide angle

Samuel Jay Keyser

If the linguistic revolution inaugurated by Noam Chomsky in his seminal 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures teaches anything, it is the role that rules play in our understanding of how the...

The Mental Life of Modernism - The wide angle

Sherri Irvin

In the first chapter, I delve into examples to show how rules affect an artwork’s meanings. In 1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created a work called <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a" target="_blank" id="">“Untitled” (Portrait of...

Immaterial - A close-up

Richard J. McNally

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...

What Is Mental Illness? - In a nutshell

Keith Wrightson

Between 2009 and 2010, I spent 16 months conducting intensive fieldwork in a Miao and a Dong minority village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province. Situated closely above the southwest border...

Ralph Tailor’s Summer - The wide angle

Andie Tucher

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...