The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago celebrates its thirtieth anniversary with this lively and richly illustrated catalog of recent acquisitions by the museum. Published in conjunction with the museum's "Smart Collect...

This volume, an amazing act of historical recovery and reconstruction, offers a comprehensive examination of Jewish women in Europe during the High Middle Ages (1000-1300). Avraham Grossman covers multiple aspects of women's lives in medieval Jewish...

The massive political, economic, and social changes China has undergone during the past decade have dramatically altered its cultural landscape. The exhibition "New Photography from China" and its catalogue offer the first comprehensive look at the b...

Lauded by Calvin Trillin as a man who "does not have to make to with translations like 'Shredded Three Kinds' in Chinese restaurants", in "The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters", James D. McCawley offers everyone a guide to deciphering the mysterie...

In "Peasants, Warriors, and Wives", Keith Moxey examines woodcut images from the German Reformation that have often been ignored as a crude and inferior form of artistic production. In this richly illustrated study, Moxey argues that while they may n...

Chicago's fine arts have long languished in the shadow of the city's architectural riches, but their time has finally come, most prominently as the focus of the final major exhibition at Chicago's Terra Museum of American Art. The attendant catalog o...

Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" o...

We "take to our beds" to be born and to grow, to hide and to dream, to lie alone and cling together, to come of age and make love, to create and procreate, to ail and to heal, to rest and to die. Key rites of human passage occur underneath the swathe...

"Our Musicals, Ourselves" is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many afi...

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelso...