We often talk loosely of the "tyranny of the majority" as a threat to the workings of democracy. But, in ancient Greece, the analogy of demos and tyrant was no mere metaphor, nor a simple reflection of elite prejudice. Instead, it highlighted an impo...

Situated on Broadway between Fourteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Union Square occupies a central place in both the geography and the history of New York City. Though this compact space was originally designed in 1830 to beautify a residential neighbo...

The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of them force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgivenes...

"Dangerous Outcast" traces prostitution in Bengal from precolonial times through the arrival of the British, examining how the profession was reordered to suit British desires. Drawing on nineteenth-century popular and folk culture, Sumanta Banerjee...

Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals – a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a p...

It is no longer controversial that the American political system has become deeply dysfunctional. Today, only slightly more than a quarter of Americans believe the country is heading in the right direction, while sixty-three percent believe we are on...

For sale in CIS only! In 1953 Dag Hammarskjold became the second Secretary-General of the United Nations – the highest international civil servant. Before his mission was cut short by a 1961 plane crash in then Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), he used hi...

Born to an African American father and Japanese mother, Frederick D. Kakinami Cloyd, the narrator of "Dream of the Water Children", finds himself not only to be a marginalized person by virtue of his heritage, but often a cultural drifter, as well. I...

For sale in CIS only! What has become of Israel's peace movement? In the early 1980s, it was a major political force, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets; but since then, its importance has declined amid spiralling violence. Now, and esp...

The 1930s witnessed a harrowing social and ecological disaster, defined by the severe nexus of drought, erosion, and economic depression that ravaged the U.S. southern plains. Known as the Dust Bowl, this crisis has become a major referent of the cli...