The world's population has grown by five billion people over the past century, an astounding 300 percent increase. Yet it is actually the decline in family size and population growth that is the issue attracting greatest concern in many countries. Th...

"Attack on Aristocratic Vice" examines the outrage against – and attempts to end – the four vices associated with the aristocracy in 18th century in England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. All four, it was commonly believed, owed their or...

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by "roughing it" in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. R...

This is an account of industrialized killing from a participant's point of view. The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day – one e...

"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it". This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The d...

In this groundbreaking book Andrew Sluyter demonstrates for the first time that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the h...

In the opening pages of this irresistible book, William Ian Miller warns, "the general themes... may strike some as glum and grim". Yet humour leavens each page as he confronts old age, its humiliations, and its undeniable hardships. Taking an enti...

<p>The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white...

Disease and commerce are among the most powerful forces that have shaped the modern world. They are also closely intertwined: over many centuries trade has been the single most important factor in the spread of diseases throughout the world. In this...

Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities – Germaine de Stael, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier – Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionali...