Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation's enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War...

One of Pierre Michon's most powerful works, this book imagines decisive moments in the lives of five artists of different times and places: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoin Watteau, Claude Lorrain and Lorentino, a little-remembered disciple o...

Canadian filmmaker and artist Michael Snow (b. 1929) is known as a pioneer of conceptualist and multimedia practice. His seminal film Wavelength (1967), described as a "45-minute zoom", investigates the relationship between time and space, a subject...

American art has been essential to The Phillips Collection since its founding by Duncan Phillips in 1921. Phillips' collecting interests were decidedly against the grain: he acquired the work of living American artists when it was unpopular to do so...

No image of prerevolutionary Russian Jewish life is more iconic than the fiddler on the roof. But in the half century before 1917, Jewish musicians were actually descending from their shtetl roofs and streaming in dazzling numbers to Russia's new cla...

A thoroughly original study of ephemeral architecture and design, "Magnificent Entertainments" examines the spectacular displays created for large-scale public and private celebrations in the Georgian period. The book focuses on a number of specific...

In Renaissance Florence, certain paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and Christ were believed to have extraordinary efficacy in activating potent sacred intercession. Cults sprung up around these "miraculous images" in the city and surroundin...

For a brief moment at the close of the 13th century, the town of Assisi was the focus for the two greatest powers in the Latin Church: the Roman papacy and the Franciscan Order. The election in 1288 of Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope, was the...

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) was a prominent Victorian lawyer, businessman, essayist and journalist. For 17 years he was editor of The Economist, and to this day the magazine includes a weekly "Bagehot" column. His analyses of politics, economics and p...

People's capacity to give meaning and direction to social life is an essential dimension of political freedom. Yet many citizens of Western democracies believe that this freedom has become quite restricted. They feel they are at the mercy of anonymou...