This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014.
How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalismThe Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West's centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order.
How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murderAfter World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency.
A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern ageIn 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours.
An in-depth look at why non-Jewish Poles are trying to bring Jewish culture back to life in Poland todaySince the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish.
The untold story of how hereditary data in mental hospitals gave rise to the science of human heredityIn the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books.
A major new history of capitalism from the perspective of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, who sustained and resisted it for centuriesThe Mexican Heartland provides a new history of capitalism from the perspective of the landed communities surrounding Mexico City.
The first English-language biography of the de facto ruler of the late Ottoman Empire and architect of the Armenian GenocideTalaat Pasha (1874-1921) led the triumvirate that ruled the late Ottoman Empire during World War I and is arguably the father of modern Turkey.
The gripping stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition-but also recovery, reunification, and rehabilitationBroken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did.
The Killing Season explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century-the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965-66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention.
A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the AmericasThe Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison.
For decades the European Union tried changing its institutions, but achieved only unsatisfying political compromises and modest, incremental treaty revisions.
They sought to transform the world, and ended up transforming twentieth-century AmericaBetween the 1890s and the Vietnam era, many thousands of American Protestant missionaries were sent to live throughout the non-European world.
A history of the successes of the human rights movement and a case for why human rights workEvidence for Hope makes the case that, yes, human rights work.
A new history of the United States that turns American exceptionalism on its headAmerican Empire is a panoramic work of scholarship that presents a bold new global perspective on the history of the United States.
A bold new literary history that says women's writing is defined less by domestic concerns than by an engagement with public lifeIn a bold and sweeping reevaluation of the past two centuries of women's writing, At Home in the World argues that this body of work has been defined less by domestic concerns than by an active engagement with the most pressing issues of public life: from class and religious divisions, slavery, warfare, and labor unrest to democracy, tyranny, globalism, and the clash of cultures.
A compelling account of how a group of Hasidic Jews established its own local government on American soilSettled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish historybut many precedents among religious communities in the United States.
Nasser's Gamble draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as "e;my Vietnam.
How the Jewish culture war over Kabbalah beganThe Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition.
This book focuses on one of the most visible and important consequences of total defeat in postwar Germany: the return to East and West Germany of the two million German soldiers and POWs who spent an extended period in Soviet captivity.
Using previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.
In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country.
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today.
A cultural history of the concept of pharmacy, both the material nature of drugs and the trade in medicine, in early modern China Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China's early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy.
How the history of racism without visible differences between people challenges our understanding of the history of racial thinkingRacial divisions have returned to the forefront of politics in the United States and European societies, making it more important than ever to understand race and racism.
A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth centuryWhat happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe?
How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism"e;For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,"e; John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England's founding in 1630.
How the support of patriotic sentiments in Ottoman Egypt led to an emerging Arab nationalismArab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East.
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerismTea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world.
A collection of insightful and revealing quotations on a wide range of subjects from the father of modern politicsNiccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) is the father of modern political thought, but he is also one of the greatest writers of the Renaissance and his wisdom and style extend far beyond politics to encompass a compelling philosophy of life as well.
The first complete biography of an influential historian whose dramatic life intersected with many great events and thinkers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first complete biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963), an influential and controversial German-American intellectual whose colorful and dramatic life intersected with many of the great events and thinkers of his time.
A "e;powerful text"e; (Tavis Smiley) about how religion drove the fight for social justice in modern AmericaAmerican Prophets sheds critical new light on the lives and thought of seven major prophetic figures in twentieth-century America whose social activism was motivated by a deeply felt compassion for those suffering injustice.
In recent years, North American and European nations have sought to legally remake religion in other countries through an unprecedented array of international initiatives.