Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cr...

The central argument of Edward Said's "Orientalism" is that the relationship between Britain and its colonies was primarily oppositional, based on contrasts between conquest abroad and domestic order at home. Saree Makdisi directly challenges that pr...

In "Mastering the Niger", David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of "A New Map of Africa" in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery – as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political strugg...

Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century – including the forced conversion of its native Muslim populatio...

Today, jazz is considered high art, America's national music, and the catalog of its recordings – its discography – is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the inte...

"The Mahabharata" tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that if they do, they will invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to des...

Published in 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's famous novel, "Umrao Jaan Ada", created a sensation when it came out, with its candid fictionalized account of Umrao Jaan, based on a renowned Lucknow courtesan and poetess of the same name. Considered by many...

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the Enlightenment, a manifestation of society's growing belief that the spread of knowledge and the promotion of intellectual inquiry were crucial to human development and the future of a rational soc...

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators m...

Most museum visitors can see how national character is reflected in the museum's layout and collection. But museums do more than provide a mirror for national identity; they shape it".Museums in a Global Context" looks at the way globalization has sh...