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On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of...
The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists.The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...
“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...
The Chemical Age is the story of intense famines, ceaseless wars, ravaging diseases, and ecological disasters, told through the personal lives of the scientists who strove to either halt calamity...
There’s been a lot of discussion of “cultural appropriation” in our culture recently—this is obviously a perennial topic but it seems to be a particularly charged subject in the current...
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,...
I guess there are different ways to read this book. I designed it to make people see Silicon Valley in 3D. Like the cover does: it shows Silicon Valley in...
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...
The Embattled Vote shows how the right to vote grounds participation in the decision-making of America’s democratic republic. Extreme disparities in income and wealth are embedded in today’s America. But...
Here in the U.S. we read and watch the news of countless deaths in Iraq and other war-torn countries around the world. We briefly take note of the incidents, sometimes...
As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them.How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...
Sustainability is all the rage. Political and business leaders talk earnestly and passionately about going green. A growing number of books, movies, and public conversations signal a general unease about...
There is more than one business model of human trafficking and there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. This book examines all forms of...
Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...
When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...
In the fall of 2008, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, began operations for the first time. Circulating beams of protons under the Swiss and...
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...
I have worked on the history of psychiatry for four decades now. I originally wrote on the rise of the asylum in Victorian Britain, and the emergence of the modern...
Mao’s Great Famine recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People’s Republic of China. Here are my key arguments:1. The famine did not last three years,...
Given the conceptual similarity between obscene depictions and hate speech, it would seem likely that some guidance could be drawn from the analysis of obscenity that would help us more...
As has become the practice these days, the book’s preface summarizes the book’s aims and content, as I have just done. No need to repeat those 1000 words here. But...
I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the...
This book is broadly in the field of narratology—that is the examination of how stories are structured and built. It deals with the questions of how time and change are...
At the start of each chapter is a scenario illustrating the themes it is addressing, and while the first is a speculative near-future one (a Chinese operation to seize control...
We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...
If a browsing reader were to encounter Europe’s Promise in the bookstore, I would like her or him to read the final few pages, and contemplate the final scene and...
WTF?! is a tour through a museum of the world’s weirdest practices—guaranteed to make you say, “WTF?!” Did you know that “preowned” wives were sold at auction in nineteenth-century England?...
I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military activity, which means that...
Chapter eight, ‘Imagination and creativity in markets’, begins by analysing the nature of imagination and its relationship to reason. Imagination receives strangely little attention in most of modern academia in...
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported in December 2009 that the murder rate fell by 10 percent in the United States during the first six months of 2009. That was...
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