A cultural history of causality

This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels including Crime and Punis...

A grammar of the corpse

No matter when or where one starts telling the story of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (August 4, 1578), the precipitating event for the formation of the Iberian Union, one always stumbles across dead bodies—rotting in the sun on abandoned battlefields, publicly displayed in marketplaces, exhumed...

A history of art history

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicamentsIn this authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher S. Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly disc...

A new world of revolutions

The hemispheric politics that shaped popular revolutions against European colonial rule In A New World of Revolutions, Arturo Chang reconstructs the histories, politics, and legacies of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770–1850) from the vantage point of popular movements in the Americas. Challenging ...

Acute melancholia and other essays

Showcases the best in modern medieval and religious scholarship, deploying spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion.

Agency in transnational memory politics

Alan brinkley

This book brings together essays on Alan Brinkley's major works and ideas as well as personal reminiscences from leading historians and thinkers beyond the academy. They chronicle the life and thought of a working historian, the development of historical scholarship in our time, and the role that...

An infinite history

An innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generationsMarie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. ...

Animal rights

This comprehensive and diverse anthology, the only one of its kind, illuminates the complex evolution of moral thought regarding animals and includes writings from ancient Greece to the present. Animal Rights reveals the ways in which a variety of thinkers have addressed such issues as our ethica...

Art and posthistory

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to t...

At the mercy of their clothes

At the Mercy of Their Clothes explores the agency of fashion in modern literature. Celia Marshik’s study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory.

Autobiography of an archive

A scholar’s intellectual awakening set against the backdrop of two disciplines and many journeys.

Beyond marx and other entries

Beyond Marx and Other Entries explores everything from semiotics, economics, anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy and political science, to Franz Kafka's literary works.

Bound together

This book examines US gay and lesbian leather archives alongside contemporary artistic practices that reframe and renegotiate historical source material, creating a queer politics of the present.

Buddhist historiography in china

John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks for what they tell us a...

Chronos

In Chronos, a leading French historian ranges from Western antiquity to the Anthropocene, pinpointing the crucial turning points in our relationship to time. François Hartog considers the genealogy of Western temporalities, examining the order of times and the divisions of time into epochs.

Clio wired

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional h...

Creative pasts

The "Maratha period" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. In this book, Prachi Deshpande considers the importance of this period for a varie...

Critique of journalistic reason

This book examines philosophy’s recurrent preoccupation with journalism. It shows how modern European philosophy's preoccupation with the news inflects theories of history, time, and language.

Debates on stalinism

Debates on Stalinism introduces major debates about Stalinism during and after the Cold War. It introduces major debates and major historians of the Soviet Union during the brutal reign of Stalin. Readers will better understand not only the history of our current understanding of Stalinism but al...

Discovering history in china

Since its first publication, Paul A. Cohen's Discovering History in China has occupied a singular place in American China scholarship. Translated into three East Asian languages, the volume has become essential to the study of China from the early nineteenth century to today. Cohen critiques the ...

English local history

The classic guide to exploring English local history, brought up to date and expanded.This is a book for anyone wanting to explore local history in England. It summarises, in an accessible and authoritative way, current knowledge and approaches, bringing together and illustrating the key sources ...

European regions and boundaries

References to regional differences remain central to cultural and political discourse all over the European continent. This collection presents a synoptic view of these regional concepts together with the historical and disciplinary contexts where they had emerged by bringing together prominent...

Feeling memory

What did it feel like to be a child in France during World War II? Feeling Memory is an affective exploration of children’s lives in wartime France and the ways they are remembered.

Filming history from below

In recent decades, a type of historical documentary has emerged that focuses on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as “microhistorical documentaries” and examines how they push cinema’s capacity as a producer of h...

Global intellectual history

Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may ari...

Hard rain

Bob Dylan’s iconic 1962 song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” stands at the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of the song, considering the meanings of history and memory in folk cultures and in Dylan’s work.

Henry stubbe and the beginnings of islam

the first English text to positively document the Prophet Muhammad’s life, celebrate the Qur’ān as a divine revelation, and praise the Muslim toleration of Christians, undermining a long legacy of European prejudice and hostility

Historical dynamics

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematica...

Imagined histories

This collection of essays by twenty-one distinguished American historians reflects on a peculiarly American way of imagining the past. At a time when history-writing has changed dramatically, the authors discuss the birth and evolution of historiography in this country, from its origins in the la...

In the forest of the blind

Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of t...

Inlands

This book examines key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history.

Intelligence work

Intelligence Work establishes a new genealogy of American social documentary, proposing a fresh critical approach to the aesthetic and political issues of nonfiction cinema and media. Jonathan Kahana argues that the use of documentary film by intellectuals, activists, government agencies, and com...

Journeys of the mind

A beautifully written personal account of the discovery of late antiquity by one of the world’s most influential and distinguished historiansThe end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the wid...

Kuhn's legacy

Bojana Mladenović offers a novel analysis of Thomas Kuhn’s central philosophical project. Kuhn’s Legacy demonstrates the vitality of Kuhn’s philosophical project and its importance for the study of the philosophy and history of science today.

Lyrical individualism

Lyrical Individualism presents a selection of André Colomer’s crucial writings, with a focus on anarchist theory and the philosophy of Henri Bergson.

Memory, trauma, and history

In these essays, Michael S. Roth uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. He first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of medical criteria for diagnosing m...

Moved by the past

A prominent Dutch historian upsets our linear conception of time and event and introduces a new way to envision history.

My ukraine

A collection of Leonid Finberg's writings and a testament to his reflections on culture, history, and the present.

On conservation as a human science

Conservators as first responders in a world where our cultural heritage is increasingly at riskConservation can be understood as a form of knowing; conservators extract meaning about the past from what remains, while noting what is missing and sometimes repairing it. In this erudite and virtuosic...

On the difficulty of living together

Manuel Cruz offers a nuanced study of memory and forgetting, defining their forms and uses, political meanings, and social and historical implications. Memory is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon, he argues, but an impressionable and malleable one, used to advance a variety of agendas.

Poetics of history

Poetics of History places Rousseau at the origin of modern speculative philosophy by showing that his thinking on the theater, despite its dependence on a false and conventional reading of Aristotle, nonetheless articulates a radical thinking of originary mimesis, and, well before Hegel, an under...