How American conflicts about religion have always symbolized our foundational political values When Americans fight about “religion,” we are also fighting about our conflicting identities, interests, and commitments.
An exploration of life in the early medieval West, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy In the early medieval West, from North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture.
The story of how Brazilian Catholics and Protestants confronted one of the greatest shocks to the Latin American religious system in its 500-year history This innovative study explores the transition in Brazil from a hegemonically Catholic society to a religiously pluralistic society.
A compelling exploration of what real life was like for residents of Civil War–era Atlanta In 1845, Atlanta was the last stop at the end of a railroad line, the home of just twelve families and three general stores.
The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor.
A pathbreaking history of how participants in the slave trade influenced the growth and dissemination of medical knowledge As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives.
This book is the first in English to explore both Belarus’s complicated road to nationhood and to examine in detail its politics and economics since 1991, the nation’s first year of true independence.
In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke.
A controversial look at the end of globalization and what it means for prosperity, peace, and the global economic order Globalization, long considered the best route to economic prosperity, is not inevitable.
A pioneering history of cross-cultural knowledge that exposes enduring fractures in unity across the world's largest continentThe nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized.
How Berlin captivated Hitler's imagination, and how he sought to redesign the city to align with his obsessions and ambitions From his first visit to Berlin in 1916, Hitler was preoccupied and fascinated by Germany's great capital city.
In this follow-up to his much-praised book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Frank Ledwidge argues that Britain has paid a heavy cost - both financially and in human terms - for its involvement in the Afghanistan war.
This groundbreaking new study examines the history of the Yaqui people and their interactions with the Spanish Empire from first contact through Mexican independence.
Commentaries by top scholars alongside the most important documents and speeches concerning the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 The two world wars brought an end to a long-standing system of international commerce based on the gold standard.
An erudite and highly enjoyable exploration of the most intriguing of personal spaces, from Greek and Roman antiquity through todayThe winner of France's prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this imaginative and captivating book explores the many dimensions of the room in which we spend so much of our lives the bedroom.
A major new biography, illuminating the great mystery of Benjamin Franklin’s faith Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson.
A master historian illuminates the tumultuous relationship of Il Duce and his young lover Claretta, whose extraordinarily intimate diaries only recently have become available Few deaths are as gruesome and infamous as those of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, and Claretta (or Clara) Petacci, his much-younger lover.
Surprisingly, no previous book has ever explored how family life shaped the political careers of America's great Founding Fathers-men like George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century BritainBritain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society.
Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the Soviet Bloc.
Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities —Germaine de Staël , Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier—Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France.
David Torres-Rouff significantly expands borderlands history by examining the past and original urban infrastructure of one of America's most prominent cities; its social, spatial, and racial divides and boundaries; and how it came to be the Los Angeles we know today.
A compelling study that charts the influence of Indigenous thinkers on Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality.
The world of fiber optic connections reaching neighborhoods, homes, and businesses will represent as great a change from what came before as the advent of electricity.
Baskets made of baleen, the fibrous substance found in the mouths of plankton-eating whalesa malleable and durable material that once had commercial uses equivalent to those of plastics todaywere first created by Alaska Natives in the early years of the twentieth century.
The untold story of Israel’s diplomatic maneuvering in the wake of the Six Day War, which frustrated a possible peace settlement Israel’s victory in the June 1967 Six Day War provided a unique opportunity for resolving the decades-old Arab-Zionist conflict.
A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature--selected as the literature book of the year by the London Times "e;[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.
Religious liberty is usually examined within a larger discussion of church-state relations, but Thomas Kselman looks at several individuals in Restoration France whose high-profile conversions fascinated their contemporaries.
The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens.
Spain’s infamous “false chronicles” were alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 in a monastic library deep in the heart of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire by the Jesuit priest Jerónimo Román de la Higuera.
The surprising story of Iran's transformation from America's ally in the Middle East into one of its staunchest adversariesOffering a new view of one of America's most important, infamously strained, and widely misunderstood relationships of the postwar era, this book tells the history of America and Iran from the time the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the throne in 1941 to the 1979 revolution that brought the present Islamist government to power.
A new history of post'Revolutionary Haiti, and the society that emerged in the aftermath of the world’s most successful slave revolution Haiti is widely recognized as the only state born out of a successful slave revolt, but the country’s early history remains scarcely understood.
The first complete biography of a little-known but fascinating figure in the history of espionage and the American Revolution A man of as many names as motives, Edward Bancroft is a singular figure in the history of Revolutionary America.
The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism.
The life of John Davenport, who co-founded the colony of New Haven, has long been overshadowed by his reputation as the most draconian of all Puritan leaders in New England—a reputation he earned due to his opposition to many of the changes that were transforming New England in the post-Restoration era.
The master historian John Lukacs explores lasting questions and enigmas about World War II, its consequences, and its persistent legacy Sixty-five years after the conclusion of World War II, its consequences are still with us.
