When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the world reacted with shock on seeing residents of this distinctive city left abandoned to the floodwaters. After the last rescue was completed, a new worry arose – that New Orleans's unique historic fabric...

In this classic biography of composer Giuseppe Verdi, Frank Walker reveals Verdi the man through his connections with the individuals who knew him best".Walker focuses on some of the more significant people in Verdi's life and carefully scrutinizes h...

We tend to think of citizenship as something that is either offered or denied by a state. Modern history teaches otherwise. Reimagining citizenship as a legal spectrum along which individuals can travel, "Extraterritorial Dreams" explores the history...

What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth...

The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces – bells, time balls, and clock faces – that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares bene...

When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow – two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us i...

Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the relationship between natural law and natural rights. During this time, the concept of natural rights has served as a conceptual lightning rod, either strengthening or severing the bond between t...

This book draws on little-known oral histories from the Yup'ik people of southwest Alaska to detail a period of bow-and-arrow warfare that took place in the region between 1300 and 1800. The result of more than thirty years of research, discussion, a...

There's no sound quite like it, or as viscerally terrifying: the ominous rattle of the timber rattlesnake. It's a chilling shorthand for imminent danger, and a reminder of the countless ways that nature can suddenly snuff us out. Yet most of us have...

Longtime manuscript editor and "Chicago Manual of Style" guru Carol Fisher Saller has negotiated many a standoff between a writer and editor refusing to compromise on the "rights" and "wrongs" of prose styling. Saller realized that when these sides s...