700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
My intellectual trajectory in coming to this book stems from my longstanding interest in France.I’m an American who has studied France and its history for the past 30 years. I...
Throughout my career, my specialty has been criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminology.My interest in labor racketeering began in the mid 1980s when I served as a consultant for...
The book’s title is drawn from a late nineteenth century case—which is also the focus of the second chapter.Four men were shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic. After over three weeks at...
Browsing readers would enjoy the first chapter of the book, in which the mythological “biography” of the hero is established, especially his childhood, often by relying on the evidence of...
I am particularly intrigued with the story of public housing, where one would least expect to encounter “communities of citizens.”The early history of the movement to provide decent shelter at...
My own trajectory has taken a number of twists and turns.In the introduction, I mention only one of the many people who have influenced my own thought—a professor who at...
I suppose the professional path that led me to this book goes back to when I was twenty-two years old and read for the first time Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. Subtitled...
Forget technology and weather for now. I want to spend some of my few allotted words talking about something else: China’s much neglected military tradition.Western scholars—like the famous Victor Davis...
The book’s Prologue tells a story of murder and marginalization in the badlands of Philadelphia, a place where an explosive collision between urban transformation and rightward moving social politics has...
Reading Orientalism is literally a re-reading of the late Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s powerful critique remains a milestone in the critical theory of academic bias three decades after its first...
A section of Chapter 8 on the ascendancy of Reagan to the presidency is titled “It’s the Ideology, Stupid.” President Reagan is a central character in the book, because he...
The U.S.A. was the product of a successful revolution so it may seem paradoxical to regard many of its leading figures as conservative. However, they recognized their achievement as fragile,...
The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their...
I don't think any person's path is the same as any others. I grew up watching a lot of movies. I didn't know that could be a profession until I went to college to study in a very different area. There was a course on film appreciation, and that made me realize you could study film. And I started studying, reading, collecting books on cinema. I was very influenced by Hitchcock...
People check their mobile phones over 80 times every day, and while that frequency may alarm us as we survey a crowd of people hunched over their phones, it is...
Disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine have always taken animals seriously as the subject of research. In the humanities and social sciences, the field sometimes known as “animal studies” began...
I have always been concerned about the role that theory might play as a resource in providing both a language and a context for understanding and addressing important social issues....
How and why do international environmental norms arise? In what ways do they affect behavior? Do they change what states and individuals actually do, and, if so, why? How effective...
It is hard to choose just one from the plentitude of examples—from all corners of the world—for how not to promote entrepreneurship.But here is a striking case.In 1970s and 1980s,...
The book offers a systematic explanation of the changes in role-expectations that scientists who participate in environmental policymaking will face. It is rocky terrain that, for some scientists, is difficult...
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,...
Of course, homelessness is one of the major problems facing society today. Part of the impetus for this project was to think historically about representations of homelessness to see how...
Perfect Communities tells the story of Levittown, America’s iconic postwar suburb. It’s really the story of Levittowns, plural, because there were four in the United States, eight in France, and...
Protest Politics in Germany is about the interactions between protest groups, their allies, and their opponents. The settings are conflicts that have dominated German politics in the last quarter of...
I was walking down a hall at MIT when I heard an odd sound: two graduate students in Ken Stevens’ laboratory had programed a computer to synthesize a whale belching....
My interest in this topic began in 1999 when I was sitting in the back of a bus in Japan, reading an article about Aum Shinrikyo, a cult that released...
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...
So that we might learn what it means to remember one facet of our cultural legacy, we include in the book some two dozen concise essays addressing everything from Frederick...
The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...
The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....
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