700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
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...
I guess I’d like readers to skip the introduction and prologue and go right to the first chapter. In it I recount discussing Herman Melville’s great tome, Moby-Dick, two chapters...
My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...
The Prometheus Bomb is an account of the building of the atomic bomb that ended combat in the Pacific theater of World War II. The book focuses on how breakthroughs...
Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...
Much of Violence Taking Place appears to be dedicated to violence “over there,” apparently far away—politically if not geographically—from most readers in the Global North.But in one section of the...
In the book, I argue that camp spaces are an inexorable environment – one that is unique because it is always being built or rebuilt, always becoming. With this in...
The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex.Rather than a return...
This book is intentionally hybrid: it mixes literary criticism, commentary on teaching, reflections on the role of the Humanities, and personal memoir. This was a risky choice, on my end,...
Why did I wrote the book? I was surprised to find that there is no published study of this stone industry, which is the largest private sector employer in the...
A reader might be surprised to find a full-page picture of a mechanical rooster toward the beginning of Painted Palaces. The bird is more than three feet tall, and it...
This book tells my personal story, that is, the story of a young scientist, driven by a curiosity about the natural world, who found himself wandering, essentially by accident, into...
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...
Dance of the Furies is an attempt to understand 1914 by taking a wider view of European society. Instead of focusing on the perhaps dozen or so men whose decisions...
Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling “rock” cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and...
If politics plays out on a field of ultimate meanings, then political theory must give way to political theology. Theology here refers not to any of the sectarian beliefs but...
Madness is something whose mysteries puzzle us still. The loss of reason, the sense of alienation from the common sense world the rest of us imagine we inhabit, the shattering...
In the fourth chapter, “Palestinian Spokesmen,” I discuss little-known dimensions of two famous Palestinian writers: Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. While Darwish is best known for his poetry and Kanafani...
Each chapter deals with similar questions. What were the main forces that shaped business and its role in the economy? What new businesses emerged? How did they operate? What was...
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...
The discussion and arguments are generally easy to follow. Even so, my guess is that the casual reader will most likely turn first to the graphics, which were chosen to...
By taking into account recent archaeological discoveries and reinterpreting ancient literary sources, I tell Philip’s story in my book, and I reassess the impact of his reign. In doing so,...
The idea for this book started at a cocktail party. It was April 2011, just over a year after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As ACA continued to...
When we talk about the history of photography, we largely mean the history of European and American photography. Then, we attach the “other” photographies: Indian, South American, African, Arab, etc....
In the book’s introduction I explain Puerto Rico’s state in relation to other commonwealth states.Chapter One, “State and Artifice,” examines the eighteenth-century paintings of José Campeche and the nineteenth-century painting...
A browsing reader might find the chapters on craft production and trade most revealing. The archaeology shows us that even small communities during the so-called Dark Ages belonged to complex...
The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe...
Browsing readers might try Chapter 5, “God’s Urban Hothouse.” Anyone doubtful about religiosity in early and mid-twentieth-century Manhattan might profitably turn to this chapter, which describes Manhattan as a modern...
My book is a biography of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the influential Egyptian ideologue of Islamic revolution.No other Islamist thinker, with the possible exception of the South Asian Abu l-A‘la Mawdudi...
While radical reform is necessary at every level of higher education, it needs to start with a thorough restructuring of graduate education and, by extension, a redesign of the curriculum...
A browser, who simply starts at the beginning and reads through the initial discussion of American exceptionalism, will see how our most familiar political practices and beliefs include a distinctive...
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...
Hot Stuff is a cultural history of disco that is at once scholarly and popular. The book charts disco’s trajectory—from its steamy beginnings in Manhattan’s gay clubs through its Blob-like...
My earliest publications, on childhood in ancient Greece, grew out of my involvement with the movement to force the University of Toronto to provide day-care for the children of its...
Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...
The book gives a manifold view of emerging Asian post-genomic science. Each chapter features scientists at work in an adjacent field, constantly challenged by the contingencies of making scientific wagers...
Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...
My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...
Inventing the Enemy grew out of my previous book, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, which described the impact of the terror on the unions, workers, and industry....
The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...
The book draws on numerous theoretical and empirical paradigms. Perhaps foremost among these is the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), also popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This paradigm holds that...
Global Lives aims to offer an introduction to global history between 1550 and 1800. Focusing on Britain’s changing relationships with the rest of the world, it sets out the contours...
I actually began thinking about this book about two decades ago. I teach at a liberal arts college and I have had numerous fruitful interactions ranging from casual conversations with...
The book’s epilogue is entitled “Writing.” It is short, about seven pages, but it tells a story about a trip I made to Ethiopia with my older brother, right before...
Historically speaking, theorizing the nature of the political state from a feminist point of view is in its earliest stages. So my book offers a novel feminist account of the...
This book examines the War of 1812 between the American republic, the British empire, and their Indian allies.Most of the fighting took place in the hotly contested region between Montreal,...
Although Thomas Mann’s War is primarily a book about the 1930s and 1940s, I embarked on the project because of my interest in contemporary literature. This connection came full circle...
Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? challenges two key misconceptions about science fiction. The first misconception, which I already addressed, is the notion that science fiction is devoted not to...
Although books on advertising history examine representations of gender, advertising history is a gendered narrative reflecting mostly men’s rather than women’s experience in advertising. To retell the history of advertising,...
Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people live in residence...
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!
