In this updated and expanded edition of his classic text, Arend Lijphart offers a broader and deeper analysis of worldwide democratic institutions than ever before. Examining thirty-six democracies during the period from 1945 to 2010, Lijphart arrive...

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her ve...

The Barnes Foundation is home to the world's largest collection of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a Philadelphia scientist who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, established the Foundation in 1922 in Merion, P...

For many years, ornithology was the province of the wealthy gentleman hunter who shot, stuffed, and preserved his specimens, and of the museum that collected simply to document natural history, not to analyze it. Even as evolutionary theory began to...

Modern-day London abounds with a multitude of gardens, enclosed by railings and surrounded by houses, which attest to the English love of nature. These green enclaves, known as squares, are among the most distinctive and admired features of the metro...

For more than sixty years, John Lukacs has been writing, teaching, and reading about the past. In this inspired volume, he turns his attention to the future. Throughout "The Future of History", Lukacs reflects on his discipline, eloquently arguing th...

This extraordinary book encompasses the time period from the first Christian evangelists' arrival in Latin America to the dictators of the late twentieth century. With unsurpassed knowledge of Latin American history, John Lynch sets out to explore th...

Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the...

During the last two centuries BC, the Western Han dynasty of China forged the first stable empire covering all of China and presided over a golden age that shaped much of subsequent Chinese art and culture. From family values to the structure of the...

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), one of Russia's great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the...