If you are a young person, and you work hard enough, you can get a college degree and set yourself on the path to a good life, right? Not necessarily, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, and with "Paying the Price", she shows in damning detail exactly why. Quite...

This intellectual biography of Hans Kohn (1891-1971) looks at theories of nationalism in the twentieth century as articulated through the life and work of its leading scholar and activist. Hans Kohn was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his...

Through the lens of seven scholars, this book examines fine art and commercial design as they both reflected and helped create the vibrant culture of public spectacle in late nineteenth-century Paris. Posters and prints circulated across the city, as...

Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases – all on the fly. Or think of a comedy troupe riffing on a couple of cues from the audience until the w...

For decades, Woodrow Wilson has been remembered as either a paternalistic liberal or reactionary conservative at home and as a na??ve idealist or cynical imperialist abroad. Historians' harsh judgments of Wilson are understandable. He won two electio...

Howard S. Becker is a name to conjure with on two continents – in the United States and in France. He has enjoyed renown in France for his work in sociology, which in the United States goes back more than fifty years to pathbreaking studies of devian...

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In "Sweet Science", Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Roma...

Howard S. Becker is a master of his discipline. His reputation as a teacher, as well as a sociologist, is supported by his best-selling quartet of sociological guidebooks: "Writing for Social Scientists", "Tricks of the Trade", "Telling About Society...

The southern coast of Alaska stretches over six hundred miles, its sweeping crescent studded with glaciers and beaches that connect temperate rainforest to frozen islands. While its soaring beauty attracts thousands of visitors a year, it also hides...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphas...