Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. Duri...

"Origin of the German Trauerspiel" was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama", but in fact the subject is something else – the play of mourning. How...

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American press embraced a new way of reporting and selling the news. The causes were many: the proliferation of television, pressure to rectify the news media's dismal treatment of minorities and women, accusations of bias...

The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age...

The Napoleonic wars did not end with Waterloo. That famous battle was just the beginning of a long, complex transition to peace. After a massive invasion of France by more than a million soldiers from across Europe, the Allied powers insisted on a lo...

The award-winning genetic researcher who helped tame the Ebola epidemic pairs up with a prize-winning journalist to tell the story of what happened and what would have to change to prevent the next outbreak from spiraling out of control. At the heig...

An essential account of America's most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time. "Our American Israel" tells the st...

Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) was a celebrated diplomat, historian, philosopher, and humanist scholar of the early Renaissance who mastered ancient Greek and Hebrew as well as classical Latin. In this treatise, dedicated to Alfonso of Aragon, King of...

This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite academic focus on orality and on composition in performance, we have yet to fully appreciate the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" as the sophisticated scripts that they a...

One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar" gathers two decades' worth of Helen Vendler's essays, book r...