This deeply imaginative and wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. Ruth HaCohen focuses her study on a "musical libel" – a variation on the Passion story that recurs in v...

Edward Hopper (1882-1967), long recognized as the premier 20th-century American realist painter, was famously introverted and reclusive. He rarely spoke about his personal life, and his close friends were few and love interests fewer. Until now, ther...

In the century between the accession of Elizabeth I and the restoration of Charles II, a horticultural revolution took place in England. Ideas were exchanged across networks of gardeners, botanists, scholars, and courtiers, and the burgeoning vernacu...

Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural polic...

In December 1921, the poet Manuel Maples Arce (1898-1981) papered the walls of Mexico City with his manifesto Actual No. 1, sparking the movement Estridentismo (Stridentism). It is inspired by Mexico's rapid modernization following the Mexican Revolu...

In the years between the two world wars, the enormous vogue of "things Mexican" reached its peak. Along with the popular appeal of its folkloric and pictorialist traditions, Mexican culture played a significant role in the formation of modernism in t...

In the early 20th century, the desire to see clothing in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic: models tangoed, slithered, swaggered, and undulated before customers in couture houses and department stores. "The Mechanical Smile" traces the...

Violent mutiny was common in seafaring enterprises during the Age of Discovery – so common in fact, that dealing with mutineers was an essential skill for captains and other leaders of the time. Mutinies in today's organizations are much quieter, mor...

On October 27, 1960, art critic Pierre Restany named a group of Paris-based artists the "Nouveaux Realistes" (New Realists) in a founding declaration that stated, "The New Realists recognize their collective singularity. New Realism = new perceptual...

Reissued with a new preface to commemorate the first publication of "a la recherche du temps perdu" one hundred years ago, " Marcel Proust" portrays in abundant detail the extraordinary life and times of one of the greatest literary voices of the twe...