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We are experiencing a triple crisis: urban crisis, climate crisis, and migration crisis. The first involves the demographic explosion, congestion, air pollution, and growing social inequality; the second, global warming...
In this regard, it is instructive to look at the difference between Soper and Donald A. Henderson. Soper died in 1977, before the last case of smallpox was identified and...
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...
Even as shooting wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, and may yet be sparked over Taiwan, there is much talk about the ways in which modern states face...
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...
Given the philosophical training I received, I was rather frustrated that the recent philosophy of the embodied, extended, embedded, and enactive mind, collectively known in some philosophical circles as 4E,...
More offers a new narrative of the human story that highlights the importance of intentional reproduction—wanting a child, and then having one—in the evolution of civilization and in light of...
The book is about famine, one of the greatest catastrophes that could befall any community. It offers a clear, non-technical overview of a fraught topic and of a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary...
Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican...
I begin the book with the story of passenger rights in the EU—a story which illustrates many of the dynamics described in the book.Many readers will be familiar with the...
I called the book A History of Sake, because my method is mostly historical. I have looked at a lot of written documents, but I find that the more I...
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...
Our book relates to big questions such as what counts as a state in the international system and how many states there were at different points in time. These are...
I am sometimes asked what a grown man, let alone a Harvard business professor, is doing with a history of the beauty industry. Underlying the question is the assumption that...
The book attempts to bring together three related bodies of literature and make them speak to each other. The first one is behavioral economics. Through thousands of experiments, this literature...
If historians don’t try to explain why the world has turned out the way it has, they are falling down on the job. Yet academic historians often have trouble seeing...
The book’s cover image tells a powerful story. Martin Parr, the photographer, is one of my favorite artists. Over the years, he’s built an incredible body of work documenting the...
We see more and more disasters in the news every day. It is getting to the point where, with the exception of the current COVID-19 pandemic, major record-setting disasters barely...
Icons of Life explains how we came to think of embryos as tiny, unborn versions of our selves.Today embryos and fetuses are veritable little persons; they star in their own...
I tried as much as possible to let the people of 1914 speak for themselves. I also tried to juxtapose words written by people from opposing sides on roughly the...
The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...
My favorite pages in the book are pages 58 to 64, the subheading titled “Imaging the Future” in which I describe how Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner and...
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...
Once Before Time explores questions about the nature of time and space, and whether or not they have a definite beginning.Developments in physical theories (General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and attempts...
Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary...
There are so many encounters, described in the book, which continue to affect me. Maybe the reader would stumble on one of them and see its poignancy.A strapping, homeless, youth...
If a just-browsing reader were to open the book I would like them to begin reading the Introduction. The Introduction seeks to explain why the animus concept is so important,...
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...
Casualties of Credit offers a cultural history of early modern money. In exploring the intellectual underpinnings of the seventeenth-century English Financial Revolution, I uncover how people conceived of money and...
I would hope that a reader would start with the introduction. It frames the issues and activities that develop in the book, sets the geographical scene, and explains quite why...
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