Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-twentieth century through Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", after which the word "psychedelic" was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: the earliest Andean c...

The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century's growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their desires were satiated by determined entrepreneurs building new venues for po...

When it was published in 2015, Andrew Hartman's history of the culture wars was widely praised for its compelling and even-handed account of the way they developed and came to define American politics as the twentieth century drew to its close. Recei...

The leaders that are remembered by history both define the world they live in and change that world forever. Whether their leadership is inspirational, innovative, decisive or ultimately destructive, we have a lot to learn from the lives and achievem...

Literature has, from the start of the nineteenth century, cast the suburbs as dull, vulgar, and unimaginative margins where, by definition, nothing important takes place. Sarah Bilston argues that such attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural...

Not too long ago, it might have seemed impossible that cannabis would step out of the shadows into the mainstream. But now, as legalization sweeps the globe, a new weed culture is evolving with its own set of rules – and thousands of new devotees eag...

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing.  Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imaginat...

In recent years, social workers have raised a new concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. Even employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so under compensated that they cannot afford a place to...

For sale in CIS only! The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced a small number of iconic figures and what this tells us about cross-border, trans-cult...

Today, cities around the globe are planting street trees to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, as landscape historian Sonja Dumpelmann explains, this is not a new phenomenon. In her eye-opening work, Dumpelmann shows how New York City a...