Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.

This pathbreaking collection of essays recasts the prevailing conceptions of the historical roots and role of the U.S. Communist Party and its social setting. The contributors focus on the movement that formed around the party and the popular culture it...

Duncan Kennedy argues that an American radicalism is both possible and desirable. One base for radical politics is the big institutional workplace; another is popular culture--whence his emphasis on phenomena like sexy dressing. Kennedy's aim is to wed...

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to...

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings,...

One of The New York Times's best books of 2024 so farNamed a best book of 2024 by The New Yorker and VultureNamed a most anticipated book of 2024 by Foreign Policy | Lit Hub | The Millions"Nimble and engrossing. . . [An] exemplary work of public...

A concise, engaging overview of American slavery from the beginning of the colonial era to emancipation and its aftermath. Kolchin takes a broad geographical perspective, putting American slavery in the context of a general trend toward use of forced...

Spivak debates general questions of theory with political philosophers such as Habermas and Althusser, psychoanalysts such as Kristeva, and with legal theorists such as Dworkin.

How has it happened that the United States and the Soviet Union have managed to get through more than four decades of Cold War confrontation without going to war with one another? Historian John Lewis Gaddis suggests answers to this and other vital...

Western philosophies of history commonly regard nature as a mere arena in which human beings suffer, labour and create. In this lucid and clearly written contribution to the subject, Blackburn argues that such a narrow perspective must be transcended...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1994"Burke's study is unique in that it distills many of the previous efforts to address the interface between history and social theory into a concentrated, elegantly written, and thought-provoking analysis of key...

One of the most eminent historians of our time offers here a perceptive guide to the study of history. Truth in History teaches how to read, how to analyze, how to discriminate. It is as helpful to the reader whose history is created daily in the news as...

Few twentieth-century scholars have achieved such widespread admiration as the French historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944). A soldier in both world wars and leader of the Resistance who was captured, tortured, and died a heroic death, Bloch epitomizes the...

Essays advocate that writers of history have developed their own tricks of the trade in order to be reread

"Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century provides a good short course in the major popular revolutions of our century--in Russia, Mexico, China, Algeria, Cuba, and Viet Nam--not from the perspective of governments or parties or leaders, but from the...

Analyzes U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East and Latin America, and argues that the U.S. has often created political instability

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the outstanding physicists of his generation. He was also an immensely gifted writer and speaker, who thought deeply about the way that scientific discoveries have changed the way people live and think. Displaying his...