How the kibbutz movement thrived despite its inherent economic contradictions and why it eventually declinedThe kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory.
How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the gradeHow did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class?
In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity.
The first in-depth look at how postwar thinkers in Egypt mapped the intersections between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thoughtIn 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn 'Arabi-al-la-shu'ur-as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious.
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth.
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.
How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient worldHere is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire.
A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk ChopinFryderyk Chopin (1810-49), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners.
The first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern JudaismThis is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism.
A major new history of the century-long debate over what a Jewish state should beMany Zionists who advocated the creation of a Jewish state envisioned a nation like any other.
Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon.
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.
A vivid history of life in Princeton, New Jersey, told through the voices of its African American residentsI Hear My People Singing shines a light on a small but historic black neighborhood at the heart of one of the most elite and world-renowned Ivy-League towns-Princeton, New Jersey.
How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century BritainWhile eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied-from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period-less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon.
How Jewish responses during the Holocaust shed new light on the dynamics of genocide and political violenceFocusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, Ordinary Jews examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted by mass violence.
What the rulers of empire can teach us about navigating today's increasingly interconnected worldThe empires of the past were far-flung experiments in multinationalism and multiculturalism, and have much to teach us about navigating our own increasingly globalized and interconnected world.
A history of modern European cultural pluralism, its current crisis, and its uncertain futureIn 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries.
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.
The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion.
After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s.
An ambitious global history that fundamentally alters our understanding of MalthusThe New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be.
A fascinating exploration of our past, present, and future relationship with foodFor the first time in human history, there is food in abundance throughout the world.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain.
Constance Markievicz (1868-1927), born to the privileged Protestant upper class in Ireland, embraced suffrage before scandalously leaving for a bohemian life in London and then Paris.
How a group of Iranian students sought love and learning in Jane Austen's LondonIn July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy.
The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalismIn Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism.
The definitive history of conversion and assimilation of Jews in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to the presentBetween the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Jewish fold-by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying.
People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period.
A groundbreaking exploration of Garveyism's global influence during the interwar years and beyondJamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917.
The story of black conservatives in the Republican Party from the New Deal to Ronald ReaganCovering more than four decades of American social and political history, The Loneliness of the Black Republican examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan's presidential ascent in 1980.
How high energy consumption transformed postwar Phoenix and deepened inequalities in the American SouthwestIn 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders.
A panoramic social history of hurricanes in the CaribbeanThe diverse cultures of the Caribbean have been shaped as much by hurricanes as they have by diplomacy, commerce, or the legacy of colonial rule.
How two extraordinary women crossed the Victorian class divide to put Christian teachings into practice in the slums of East LondonNellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals.
Ancient Greek literature, Athenian civic ideology, and modern classical scholarship have all worked together to reinforce the idea that there were three neatly defined status groups in classical Athens--citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners.
Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, Cultural Exchange meticulously combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture.
This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages.
Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "e;horrible heresies"e; and "e;monstrous deeds.
Most studies of ancient Greek politics focus on formal institutions such as the political assembly and the law courts, and overlook the role that informal social practices played in the regulation of the political order.
From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization.
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.
The globalizing influence of professional sportsProfessional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand.
A history of celebrity from Byron to BeckhamLove it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life-and one of the least understood.
How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalismThe unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history.
This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline.
