700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The book actually began as a ‘critical thinking’ course at the University of Edinburgh. However, having done research on the history of ‘critical thinking’, I took a different approach to...
In the wake of 1968, Herbert Marcuse and, by extension, his former colleagues from the Frankfurt School became forever linked with the student protests of that era. While most of...
Before Body Modern, I had mostly focused on the earlier history and cultural politics of anatomy. In A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) I argued that, in the 19th century,...
I’ve long been interested in the moral underpinnings of human life on collective (shared) and personal (private) levels of experience. Indeed, the “ethics” of everyday life—or what Gregory Bateson referenced...
The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...
Weather, as defined by meteorologists, is the state of the atmosphere as it affects life over a period of a few minutes, or at most a few days. This distinguishes...
An accomplished artist, Brooke VanDevelder, worked with me to create customized illustrations that serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s three sections. If a potential reader is just browsing,...
C. Wright Mills argued that sociological research often springs from the intersection of personal biography and history. My book is no exception.I come from a family that bought organic foods...
Culinary Nostalgia evolved out of my attempt to make sense of an unexpected turn in my research. I set out looking for the various ways that Shanghai people used food...
I encourage readers to explore the many art controversies explored in Art and the City as windows onto the urban landscape at specific historical moments. The chapter on the Watts...
Illiberal Politics is a serious book on a serious topic. But it is also a lively book to read.The French story, which occupies the 140-page middle section of the book,...
Since the late 1980s I have been involved in social movements. Activists that went “all the way,” putting their bodies on the line, risking arrest, going on hunger strike, and...
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...
Animals inhabit diverse environments: our homes, our settlements, agricultural land, the wild. Some animals never directly encounter human beings. Others are deliberately created by us. Do these different contexts and...
In fact, two close-ups.The first is on page 17, a very brief discussion of what the book isn’t, as opposed to the remainder of the introduction, which identifies what the...
We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding...
On page 61 of the book, I quote the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, who offers “Advice for Idiots” who might attempt to read his book. His tone is sharp and...
A history does more than narrate events—it also reveals the decisive moments that give shape to a life or country. It permits consideration of turning points and alternative directions for...
The book attempts to give equal billing to scientific debates and educational practice in music and oracy. Different parts of the narrative are therefore likely to appeal to readers interested...
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...
I think that the six scenarios in my book are all compelling and dramatic. I hope that they draw the reader in, and inspire him or her to delve into...
After much delay, there is in my own country widespread acknowledgement that global warming is real and human-caused. That is a welcome development. Still, to admit that we have engineered...
Inventing the Enemy is about the period known as the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. At the height of the terror in 1937–38, the Soviet secret police under the...
I got to Le Corbusier through his letters. It took me a long time to get him. When I began the book it was like facing a vault wall in...
One might wonder why a twenty-first century reader should want to delve into a biography of someone so distant and so out of tune with the modern world.At one level...
The anatomy murders were serial killings carried out by William Burke and William Hare, two Irishmen resident in Edinburgh, Scotland. They murdered 16 people in the course of a 12-month...
Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...
I was always interested in science. I am a very curious person, and most importantly, I am a very visual person. And so, I have always asked myself the question...
Political Vocabularies is about how Americans can agree on general political principles such as freedom and equality and at the same time disagree so vehemently about how to put those...
I want my readers to understand Leonard Bernstein as a person whose political life was intimately bound up with his artistic life. I was inspired to begin writing this book...
What comes to mind when you think of opera? For most people, the word summons some variation on belting ladies, black tie, red velvet seats, opulent theatres, and diamond-encrusted snobbery...
There are two episodes, in chapters two and seven, that I hope will reward the patience of the reader. Two duels, one in 1880 and the other in 1894, mark...
Picturing American Modernity is concerned with understanding how new (and old) forms of mass entertainment such as moving pictures, world’s fairs and expositions, electric light displays, live reenactments such as...
I was born in 1961 and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, the youngest of three children. My father was an English professor from New Jersey and my mother, a homemaker...
Over the past few years, I realized that I was taking some very important things for granted, and that was probably a mistake. Speak Freely is part of an effort...
There are a bunch of really good books that take up the “What’s changed?” question at a big scale. When I first started working on this project, I didn’t think...
The baroque, as I theorize it, be it as a stylistic marker or period in art history, may be difficult to recognize for those who thought they knew it well....
On page 343 one meets Frederick Willetts, the self-proclaimed Pirate King of Edwardian London. In the early years of the twentieth century, Willetts ran a “People’s Music Publishing Company” in...
For me, the most fascinating parts of this story took place outside the stores: in a stadium of college students cheering for capitalism, a theme park about free enterprise with...
Are we turning into Freudian robots anytime soon? This is a question I was greatly tempted to put to a psychoanalyst. It turns out that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan showed...
There are two main contexts for this book, the first of which has to do with Barack Obama and charisma.I began work on this book when the then junior senator...
As we reflect on the #MeToo era, Weinstein, Epstein, and other deeply unseemly characters, it’s important to note that women’s issues and mental health were embedded in radical mental medicine...
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 may be perverse, but my favorite parts of the book are those that detail men’s most misogynistic or outrageous comments about women’s interest in public affairs.I think, for example,...
The first chapter, “A Long Engagement,” provides a narrative overview of the Japan-Korea relationship until the end of World War II. I could have relied exclusively on secondary works by...
I am never quite sure of the meaning of the word “context.” One can talk about the context of history, in which case you would read a lot about Le...
The idea that the meaning of art may not be exhausted by its visual manifestations and the desire to look is examined as a response to the pressures of commodification...
If a reader wanted to browse my book, a number of strategies suggest themselves. The introductory chapter is quite brief, but sets out the range of topics I plan to...
They both indicate that the current economic recovery from the global recession is inherently unsustainable.In 2008, the world was confronted with multiple crises—fuel, food and financial—and by December the result...
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...
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