What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza's "Thinking About History", a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent t...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! The "Theatre Theory Reader" provides the first comprehensive and critical anthology of texts reflecting on the development of the theater theory of the Prague School – or Prague Linguistic...

Throughout the twentieth century, art history has been too narrowly focused on formalism. As a result, analyses regularly reduced works of art to their materials, texture, and composition. By contrast, art historian Sebastian Egenhofer takes Gilles D...

The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and...

Alaska's perch at the geographic corner of civilization isn't all wilderness and reality TV. There's a darker side too. Above the 49th parallel some of the nation's highest rates of alcoholism, suicide, and violent crime can be found. While it can ea...

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...

Behind every great man stands a great woman. And behind that great woman stands a slave. Or so it was in the households of the Founding Fathers from Virginia, where slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era, from Moun...

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories....

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves – it is by our crimes. Surveying...

Evolutionary science has long viewed language as, basically, a fortunate accident – a crossing of wires that happened to be extraordinarily useful, setting humans apart from other animals and onto a trajectory that would see their brains (and the pro...