700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The introduction would provide the best sense of what the book covers and what it hopes to accomplish. Here is a quote:“One might have thought that the biologization of race, with its eugenic overtones, was primarily driven by voices from the Right. While this has often been the case, we also see well well-meaning liberals
The first chapter of the book is only 19 pages—but it provides a useful introduction the topic and complete overview of the book.The chapter first documents the magnitude of the...
I hope the reader would happen on one of the eighteen or so accounts of cases Foltz had and causes she tried. They show her at her brave and skillful...
The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...
I became interested in writing about age as a “non-traditional” graduate student in my early forties. Not just self-conscious about being older than my classmates, I also couldn’t help but...
If you were to approach this book at a bookstore, you would immediately be struck by the cover image. It’s a photograph of a couple sealed in plastic together with...
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...
This book is mostly inspired by almost forty years of teaching, by experiencing a loss of faith in my 20s and my understanding of the whole sweep of western history...
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...
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...
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...
While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...
Many studies of religious liberty follow one of two paths. One essentially involves a study of ideas, and tries to explain how great thinkers, like St. Augustine, either justified the...
The main concept under the surface of Becoming Batman is that of stress and adaptation. All responses of the body to exercise, training, and skill learning involve the principle that...
I first became interested in the problem of Soviet suicide after reading a footnote about a dramatic spike in suicides among Bolsheviks (or Communists) during the 1920s. Such an outburst...
From analyses of thousands of commercial and academic public opinion surveys covering presidents from Truman to Trump, with results detailed in 54 tables and 93 figures, I argue that modern...
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....
From the first time I tried to read Hegel, I remember how intimidating I found his language and yet how enticing his ideas were to me. As a result, I...
While searching for answers to Hamsun’s support for the Third Reich, I was struck by several things. First, I felt that the critical texts about Hamsun were too narrowly focused...
More broadly, this book concerns the nature of democracy, and disputes the notion that individual citizens are its foundation. I agree with the American philosopher John Dewey, who claimed that...
I myself wanted to discover what Blake was driving at. I live in South London, near where he and his wife, Catherine, lived for a decade of their long marriage...
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...
If I could look over the shoulder of a reader browsing through my book in a bookstore and whisper advice about how best to spend fifteen minutes of sampling the...
The completion in 1884 of the Washington Monument—the great obelisk in the center of the Mall—is the pivotal moment in the book’s larger narrative. While the project began in the...
I am an academic economist and most of my research has focused on the quality of life of cities.Most economists agree that the key for long run city sustainability is...
Because my approach was agnostically empirical, the book ended up packed with information not previously known or associated with universities.Here are a few examples.I addressed a question that has been...
For readers just browsing, I would hope that they would open to chapter six in the book and specifically to the section on skull cults. This is the time in...
One of my favorite passages in the book comes in the third chapter, which looks at Agfa’s German factories (particularly the Wolfen factory) during the weeks and months after World...
Today many people think that, in retrospect, the Arab spring was doomed to fail. Arab popular self-government was a “mirage,” a “false dawn.” There was no truly transformative political self-determination...
How do physicists decide that some data might constitute a discovery?The way to find out is to watch. For 18 months I watched physicists arguing about a burst of data...
The Man in the Dog Park describes the experience of homelessness from a homeless point of view. Co-authored with a homeless man, the book is based on scores of interviews...
I Am Not A Tractor! is about the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who have transformed what had...
The book begins with a story that took place during the Civil War. In 1862, the cost of the war forced the government to abandon the gold standard. The “greenback,”...
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...
I have lived in, observed, and written about Chicago for approximately 30 years.My academic home is the Political Science Department at DePaul University. I earned my Ph.D. in Urban Planning...
Readers familiar with some of the great debates in the history of science may appreciate the book’s attempt to place the modern debate over human-caused climate change in the broader...
The rise and demise of world communism was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. It was born in wars (World War I, World II), and offered an...
Many browsing readers – this is certainly true for me – would take a look at a book’s introduction. Here, the introduction gives a relatively full explanation of what I...
The first page starts with my encounter as an 18-year old college student with the Gospel of Thomas and its unconventional Jesus––an encounter that was utterly transforming for me. It...
At Berkeley where I did my graduate work in comparative literature in the 1970s, there were no courses on women, or race, or ethnicity. No one read women writers much...
In Cuba in Revolution I have gone away from the common tendency to present the Revolution’s trajectory as a series of often unrelated ‘phases’, a confusing zigzag experience of contradictory...
This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...
The book’s preface lays out how Thomas Jefferson came to be “the supremely articulate superego of the American nation,” how his Revolutionary writings translate as the conscience underlying American values....
If the argument I make is fairly simple—even intuitive: like other media, cinema domesticated the alleged wilderness of remote places and populations into entertaining representations—executing it required familiarity with a...
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...
A reader approaching my book from a “close-up” perspective would be best served by reading the introduction and conclusion.In the opening pages I lay out the broad themes of the...
The natural world contributes in crucial ways to our physical wellbeing. There are also spiritual and esthetic dimensions to what it brings, and it is these that have traditionally motivated...
The Third City is an unconventional interpretation and explanation of contemporary Chicago.By exploring this iconic American city, I comment on broader trends in American urbanism. And what I mean by...
When fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are combusted they release CO2. This greenhouse gas is no ordinary pollutant but an inherent waste byproduct of the energy...
Network theory is described in the structural relationship of things quite familiar to all of us now, as terms we hear all the time: hubs, nodes, dropped signals, latency, software...
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