Under the rule of Henry VII (r. 1485-1509) England became a powerful nation. The Tudor court sought to express its worldliness and political weight through major artistic commissions, employing Florentine sculptors and painters to create lavish new i...

Even the best ideas have little value if they are not explained clearly, concisely, and convincingly to others. Scientists, engineers, health care professionals, and technology specialists become leaders in their fields not just by way of discovery,...

One of the preeminent chroniclers of the American West, over the past decade Robert Adams has turned his attention to the woods and shores near his home on the Oregon coast. "Sea Stories" is a sequence of three narratives that follow Adams and his wi...

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, "Black Gotham" is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbours...

Joe Louis defended his heavyweight boxing title an astonishing twenty-five times and reigned as world champion for more than eleven years. He got more column inches of newspaper coverage in the 1930s than FDR did. His racially and politically charged...

Richard Brown Baker (1912-2002) began collecting works by emerging artists in the 1940s, becoming one of the first collectors to actively embrace both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and eventually amassing more than 1,600 works from the postwar p...

Emanuel Leutze's life-size "Washington Crossing the Delaware" commemorates the critical moment in the American Revolution when George Washington led a surprise attack against troops supporting the British forces in Trenton, New Jersey. When Leutze cr...

Paintings of upper-class men and women tell an important part of the history of costumes, but surviving garments themselves reveal even more. Every crease, stitch, and stain in a piece of clothing supplies information about its wearer and its era. Th...

Among practising architects today, perhaps only Robert A. M. Stern once contemplated a career as a historian, an interest that has informed both his built work and his writings. "Tradition and Invention in Architecture" brings together 26 of Stern's...

This compelling book offers a new paradigm for the periodization of the arts, one that counters a prevailing Italianate bias among historians of northern Europe of this era. The years after 1500 brought the construction of several iconic Late Gothic...