April 2019
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s...
April 2021
A history of U.S. involvement in late twentieth-century campaigns against global poverty and how they came to focus on women.
A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization...
April 2019
The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the “witness to genocide” in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian...
May 2021
This book explores Iran’s dual engagement with modern Europe: a fear of imperial expansion and the reception of European modernity. By reinventing the Persian royal tradition and by hard diplomatic bargaining, but also by absorbing aspects of European (Farangi) culture, Iranians of the Qajar era...
June 2019
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila is among the most remarkable accounts ever written of the human encounter with the divine. The Life is not really an autobiography at all, but rather a confession written for inquisitors by a nun whose raptures and mystical claims had aroused suspicion. Despite...
November 2021
Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth...
April 2019
When 20-year-old Odetta Holmes-classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson”-veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s...
March 2021
This revisionist history of succession to the throne in early modern Russia, from the Moscow princes of the fifteenth century to Peter the Great, argues that legal primogeniture never existed: the monarch designated an heir that was usually the eldest son only by custom, not by law. Overturning...
May 2019
Between 2009 and 2013, as the nation contemplated the historic election of Barack Obama and endured the effects of the Great Recession, Matthew Frye Jacobson set out with a camera to explore and document what was discernible to the “historian’s eye” during this tumultuous period. Having...
March 2021
This revisionist history of succession to the throne in early modern Russia, from the Moscow princes of the fifteenth century to Peter the Great, argues that legal primogeniture never existed: the monarch designated an heir that was usually the eldest son only by custom, not by law. Overturning...
