At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. gove
In the 1830s and '40s, a new preoccupation with the housing of the poor emerged in British print and visual culture. In response to cholera outbreaks, political unrest, and government initiatives, com
As rigid and unforgiving as the boarding schools established for the education of Native Americans could be, the intellectuals who engaged with these schools—including Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph
Counter Jihad is a sweeping account of America's military campaigns in the Islamic world. Revising our understanding of what was once known as the War on Terror, it provides a retrospective on the ext
Fateful Transitions offers a new perspective on the debate about China's ascendance and the global power shift. The book examines how democratic nations have navigated the rise of other states from 18
In the Shadow of the Gallows reveals how a sense of racialized culpability shaped Americans' understandings of personhood prior to the Civil War. Jeannine Marie DeLombard draws from legal, literary, a
In Great Britain during the Romantic period, governmental and social structures were becoming more secular; religion was privatized and depoliticized. But although the discretionary nature of religiou
The Difficult Art of Giving rethinks standard economic histories of the literary marketplace. Traditionally, American literary histories maintain that the post-Civil War period marked the transition f
In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow does not
Anyone who has paid the entry fee to visit Shakespeare's Birthplace on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon—and there are some 700,000 a year who do so—might be forgiven for taking the authenticity of
Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror examines the ways that Christian theology has shaped centuries of conflict from the Jewish-Roman War of late antiquity through the First Crusade, the French Revolution,
In an era of ethnopolitical conflict and constitutional change worldwide, nationalist and Islamist movements are two of the most powerful forces in global politics. However, the respective roles playe
The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasin
For more than forty years, the United States has maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament, and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has gradually reduced the size of America
The Well of Loneliness is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was publ
Perhaps the most significant development of the Georgian theater was its multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types parading across the stage. In Theatrical Nation, Michael Ra
Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird Bruce Thomas Boehrer"As both a fiction writer and a lover of parrots, I was delighted and enlightened by Parrot Culture. This is an
Well before his entry into the religious life in the spring of 386 C.E., Augustine had embarked on a lengthy comparison between teachings on the self in the philosophical traditions of Platonism and N
Aristotle listed moderation as one of the moral virtues. He also defined virtue as the mean between extremes, implying that moderation plays a vital role in all forms of moral excellence. But moderati
World War I constituted a milestone in the development of the United States as a world power. As the European powers exhausted themselves during the conflict, the U.S. government deployed its growing
For Vivian R. Pollak, Emily Dickinson's work is an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference that would be taken up by the generations of women poets who foll
A governor's mansion is often the last stop for politicians who plan to move into the White House. Before Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, four of his last five predecessors ha
What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, and carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We ha
Few legal events loom as large in early modern history as the trial of Galileo. Frequently cast as a heroic scientist martyred to religion or as a scapegoat of papal politics, Galileo undoubtedly stoo
