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The most important reality that my book interrogates is American antisemitism. American Jewish historians have traditionally downplayed the significance of antisemitism in the United States. They have tended to highlight...

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name - The wide angle

Mark Traugott

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 Insurgent Barricade - A close-up

Stan Ulanski

I embarked on the first stages of research for this book over ten years ago as a graduate student at UCLA, where I was doing my PhD in Islamic art...

The Gulf Stream - The wide angle

Caroline Rody

The Interethnic Imagination raises to view an important shift in the contemporary literature Americans have been reading. It claims that since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the...

The Interethnic Imagination - In a nutshell

Wendy Steiner

The Real Real Thing shows early 21st</sup>-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...

The Real Real Thing - The wide angle

David Zierler

Oddly, this book began with the history of New York City. In writing about the building of the United Nations headquarters site for my book on postwar urbanism in New...

The Invention of Ecocide - The wide angle

Aidan R. Vining

Each chapter offers interesting research findings interpreted from an economic perspective. “Chasing the Tale” reviews what evolutionary biology tells us about the transformation of wolves into dogs. It also considers...

Dog Economics - A close-up

Robert P. Burns

The second chapter of the book provides a broad historical account of the importance of the Anglo-American trial and the fierceness with which the Founding Fathers defended it. The story...

The Death of the American Trial - A close-up

Ethan Tussey

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...

The Procrastination Economy - In a nutshell

Todd McGowan

The first chapter of Emancipation After Hegel lays out the argument of the entire book in detail, so this is a good starting point. Starting at the beginning would give...

Emancipation After Hegel - A close-up

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

Andrew Sayer

This book is intended to help social scientists make sense of the fact that our relation to the world is one of concern. The concern needn’t take the form of...

Why Things Matter to People - In a nutshell

Ian Worthington

In researching and writing this book I did not set out to test any particular theory or promote any particular historical interpretation. The project began with the accidental discovery of...

Philip II of Macedonia - The wide angle

Larry Wolff

To elucidate the oneiric phenomenon, I have applied theoretical models from psychoanalysis, phenomenology, literary theory, and neuroscience to a vast array of biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts.In my judgment,...

The Idea of Galicia - The wide angle

Michael D. Gordin

There are two fundamental conceptions that animate this book, one drawn from the history of science, and the other from the history of Central Europe.The first is the principle of...

Einstein in Bohemia - The wide angle

Erin E. O'Connor

The hot parts, of course! This includes two chapters, “Fire and Sweat” and “Materia Erotica". In "Fire and Sweat," I get my first taste, so to speak, of intracorporeality. I'm...

Fire Craft - A close-up

Robert Wuthnow

Remaking the Heartland examines the profound social transformation that has taken place in the middle of the United States during the past half century. This is a region known for...

Remaking the Heartland - In a nutshell

Kay Heath

Midlife anxiety thrived in other forms of Victorian print culture as well. One good example is soap advertisements. At mid-century, an array of mass produced products were put on display...

Aging by the Book - A close-up

Harry Collins

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;...

Gravity’s Ghost - A close-up

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

Youssef Cassis

As the world’s political and economic leaders struggle with the aftermath of the financial debacle of 2008, this book asks: Have financial crises presented opportunities to rebuild the financial systems?Given...

Crises and Opportunities - In a nutshell

Susan Schulten

I have a longstanding interest in old maps. My last book, Mapping the Nation, traced a sea change in the way that Americans and Europeans thought about and used maps...

A History of America in 100 Maps - The wide angle

Jonathan Kahn

This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become ...

The Uses of Diversity - In a nutshell

E. Fuller Torrey

Although it is a book about one person it is also about the development of the media over a period of nine decades. It is very intriguing to consider how...

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods - The wide angle

Philip G. Cerny

In the 21st century, national governments are too small to provide the kind of public goods (international? transnational? global?) that are necessary to make things work, opening the way for...

nan - The wide angle

Françoise Baylis

On December 30, 2019, the Chinese scientist Jiankui He was sentenced to three years in jail and fined three million yuan. His crime? Creating the world’s first CRISPR-edited babies. My...

Altered Inheritance - In a nutshell

Ellen Wayland-Smith

The Angel in the Marketplace is a biography of Jean Wade Rindlaub, a mid-century adwoman widely recognized on Madison Avenue for her success in marketing household products to American housewives,...

The Angel in the Marketplace - In a nutshell

Stephen Bates

Part of the backdrop to the Commission on Freedom of the Press is the acrimonious relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the press. I knew a bit about...

An Aristocracy of Critics - A close-up

Françoise Baylis

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

Altered Inheritance - A close-up

M. Gigi Durham

There has been a great deal of public discussion lately about the sexualization of girlhood, from the provocative Bratz dolls for toddlers (described by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker...

The Lolita Effect - The wide angle

Darrell Duffie

This book addresses precisely the questions raised by its title.We all know that banks fail when they can’t pay their debts on time. This book spells out the specific steps...

How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about It - In a nutshell

David Livingstone Smith

In 2006, I was researching wartime propaganda and was struck by the extent to which enemies are represented as less-than-human creatures. Turning to the relevant research literature, I discovered that...

Making Monsters - The wide angle

Keith E. Whittington

After teaching jazz history for years, several independent observations led me to the concept of a book on jazz icons.I began to see how the behaviour of musicians was tied...

Speak Freely - The wide angle

Josephine Hoegaerts

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting is about what people sounded like in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t spotlight the brilliant voices of the stage or the famous voices of public figures....

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting - In a nutshell

Timothy Morton

If I were yelling at someone from a fast moving train and had only one chance to say one thing about my book before they went out of earshot, I...

The Ecological Thought - A close-up

Jennifer M. Barker

The Tactile Eye emerged as a response to my own craving for what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls “sensuous scholarship.” I was inspired by certain film and art history scholarship in...

The Tactile Eye - The wide angle

Dan Reiter

I started thinking about this book in the early 2000s. On the policy side, in 2002 the George W. Bush administration announced the National Security Strategy, sometimes called the Bush...

How Wars End - The wide angle

Kristen Whissel

Sections of chapter 4 focus on the first feature film, Traffic in Souls (1913), short films by D.W. Griffith, such as The Lonedale Operator (1911), and Lois Weber’s amazing film...

Picturing American Modernity - A close-up

Frank A. Guridy

Since childhood, I have been passionate about sports. I played baseball in my youth, but I am embarrassed to admit that I was—and still am—a sports geek who could recite...

The Sports Revolution - The wide angle

Peter Y. Paik

I had not undertaken any scholarly studies of science fiction or popular culture prior to writing this book—my graduate work had focused on the aesthetics of literary modernism. But the...

From Utopia to Apocalypse - The wide angle

Charles R. Butcher

This book corrects a Eurocentric picture of International Relations (IR) that has dominated the study of international relations over the past decades, and especially the statistical study of IR. If...

Before Colonization - In a nutshell

Tyler Volk

When you go to a doctor and the doctor gives you information about your body, the doctor makes a crucial assumption: Even though you are not a medical expert you...

Quarks to Culture - The wide angle

Theodore E. Stebbins Jr.

I don’t have the faintest idea who the audience is for this book. I just thought it would be good to write a book, so my wife and I spent...

Rethinking American Art - The wide angle

Walter Scheidel

It is always a good idea to start at the end. The epilogue of my book takes its cue from the famous question in the Monty Python movie The Life...

Escape from Rome - A close-up

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

On the one hand, this book addresses the well-known literature on Orientalism, and argues that singing Turks were not understood as simply exotic “others” on the European stage. On the...

The Apartment Plot - The wide angle

Hobson Woodward

If a reader were to ask where to sample a page or two of A Brave Vessel, I would suggest turning to the beginning of chapter five. At that point...

A Brave Vessel - A close-up

Greg L. Warchol

I set out to provide the reader with a detailed overview of the global illegal trade in African wildlife. The illegal trade involves the poaching, trafficking and consumption of common...

Exploiting the Wilderness - In a nutshell

Erin Manning

A reader encountering Relationscapes in a bookstore might find themselves attracted to the front cover, which is a reproduction of a painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kngwarreye. This might...

Relationscapes - A close-up

Greg Robinson

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

A Tragedy of Democracy - In a nutshell

Eric Weisbard

I’d hope that a browsing reader would check out a trio of entries (most are under 1000 words!) and get a sniff of the thing. For example:Early in the book:...