Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Riga timber merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a...

The intellectual scope and courage to contend with the largest puzzles of human existence and organization distinguish great social thinkers. Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was a foundational work of historical sociology...

This is the twelfth volume of the AW Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The volumes of the lectures constitute number xxxv in Bollingen series.

The Roots of Romanticism at last makes available in printed form Isaiah Berlin's most celebrated lecture series, the Mellon lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965, recorded by the BBC, and broadcast several times. A published version has been keenly...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South,...

A case for why regionalization, not globalization, has been the biggest economic trend of the past forty years The conventional wisdom about globalization is wrong. Over the past forty years as companies, money, ideas, and people went abroad, they...

A surprising history of human hair in nineteenth-century America, where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging.Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century...

In Azusa Reimagined, Keri Day explores how the Azusa Street Revival of 1906, out of which U.S. Pentecostalism emerged, directly critiqued America's distorted capitalist values and practices at the start of the twentieth century. Employing historical...

A voyage through mysterious and haunted lands, the sixth volume of The Library Esoterica delves into the art, rituals, and global mythologies of the spirit realms. Unearthing our complex beliefs around death, rebirth and resurrection, we explore the art,...

In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and...

The weakening of the federal courts⎯and how they can restore their power and Americans' access to justice⎯told through the lives of three remarkable judges.   Despite the outsize public attention paid to the Supreme Court, federal trial courts are at the...

The first book to center Black artists' voices on Black aesthetics, revealing a century of evolving relationships to race, identity, and art.   What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives...

An eloquent and moving story about the value and the pleasures of intellectual exploration—and why it matters beyond the classroom.   At a time when college students and their parents often question the "return on investment" from humanities courses,...

The first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery.   Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them. Slavery and Capitalism gives...

From the author of The Lindbergh Nanny comes an evocative mystery about the 1920 murder of the gambler Joseph Elwell, featuring New Yorker writer Morris Markey and Zelda Fitzgerald.New York, 1920.Zelda Fitzgerald is bored, bored, bored. Although she’s...