When Americans fight about "religion", we are also fighting about our conflicting identities, interests, and commitments. Religion-talk has been a ready vehicle for these conflicts because it is built on enduring contradictions within our core politi...

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, over 100,000 commercial content mo...

This comprehensive guide covers the historically rich and nuanced territory of Central Leinster, from the western borderlands of the medieval English Pale to the wild expanse of the Bog of Allen and further west to Clonmacnoise, cradle of early monas...

Charleston, South Carolina, which boasts America's first historic district, is known for its palmetto-lined streets and picturesque houses. The Holy City, named for its profusion of churches, exudes an irresistible charm. Award-winning author and cul...

When people talk about the resurrection they often assume that the bodies in the afterlife will be perfect. But which version of our bodies gets resurrected – young or old, healthy or sick, real-to-life or idealized? What bodily qualities must be rec...

Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals – a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a p...

This engaging and accessible study looks at the origins, evolution, purpose, and limitations of intellectual property. Detailing how intellectual property affects industry, politics, cultural expression, and medical research, Aram Sinnreich takes a m...

In this thematic survey, Gabriel Paquette focuses on the development of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch overseas empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He draws on recent advances in the field to re-examine their dev...

The painter, designer, and architect Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) played a crucial role in expanding modernist aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing growing nationalism around 1900, he sought to make painting the basis of an aesthet...

Bill Viola (b. 1951) is one of today's premier video installation artists whose apparently straightforward imagery belies a decades-long investigation into the human imagination and its various states of consciousness. This unique and accessible guid...