A fascinating exploration of the visual culture of mortality in Renaissance Europe. We often imagine the Renaissance as an age of exceptional human progress and artistic achievement. But, intriguingly, macabre images proliferated in precisely this p...

Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian...

The fourth volume of the "John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonne" comprises approximately 370 works that represent the activity of this iconic conceptual artist between 1994 and 2004. Here, John Baldessari (b. 1931) continues to interrogate the possibili...

From 1941 to 1964, "House Beautiful" magazine's crusading editor-in-chief Elizabeth Gordon introduced and promoted her vision of "good design" and "better living" to an extensive middle-class American readership. Her innovative magazine-sponsored ini...

The cadaver industry in Britain and the United States, its processes and profits. Except for organ transplantation little is known about the variety of stuff extracted from corpses and repurposed for medicine. A single body might be disassembled to...

For more than six centuries, European painters have been ambitious to depict objects as if they possessed volume, placing them in a space that seems equivalent to the real space of our world. This "fiction" was central to the artist's purpose. Throug...

With the rise of museums in the 19th century, including the formation in 1824 of the National Gallery in London, as well as the proliferation of widely available published reproductions, the art of the past became visible and accessible in Victorian...

From the comfortable distance of seven decades, it is quite easy to view the victory of the Allies over Hitler's Germany as inevitable. But in 1940 Great Britain's defeat loomed perilously close, and no other nation stepped up to confront the Nazi th...

The result of a collaborative, multi year project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense", the studies assembled here ask, How hav...

How the West sleepwalked into another Cold War A native of Yalta, Constantine Pleshakov is intimately familiar with Crimea's ethnic tensions and complex political history. Now, he offers a much-needed look at one of the most urgent flash points in cu...