Intellectuals "have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn", writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: are intellectual public figures essential voi...

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a "rail-road" that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed thi...

Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world's only Nobel literature laureate, is best known internationally for his short stories and novels, including The Cairo Trilogy. But in Egypt he was equally familiar to newspaper readers for the column he wrote for many y...

This book examines the history of early secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Molly Pucci delves into the ways their origins diverged from the original Soviet model based on differi...

Now available in English for the first time, Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus's "Third Walpurgis Night" was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews...

Ever since the age of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean has had a significant pull for Britons – including many painters and poets – who sought from it the inspiration, beauty, and fulfillment that evaded them at home. Refer...

Updated with two new chapters, this book exposes the profound influence of the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar in Syria's bloody conflict and explores the implications of the perceived decline of American power in the Mid...

The city of Acre, powerfully fortified and richly provisioned, was the last crusader stronghold. When it fell in 1291, two hundred years of Christian crusading in the Holy Land came to a bloody end. With his customary narrative brilliance and immedia...

The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three cent...

The Dutch Golden Age has long been seen as the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings captured the public imagination and came to represent the marvel that was the Dutch Republic. Yet there is another, largely overlooked marvel in the Dutch wo...