Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with...

With the development of the B-29 "Superfortress" in summer 1944, strategic bombing, a central component of the Allied war effort against Germany, arrived in the Pacific theater. In 1945 Japan experienced the three most deadly bombing attacks of the war...

A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us.A New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceHow is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest?Why is a famous...

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, what we think of now as atrocities have not always invited...

A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future.   Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of...

From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global responseThe postwar global order was in many ways shaped in...

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Foreign Policy, Literary Hub, and The MillionsGhosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family―the climax of a yearslong project.When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his...

Looking at the Far East and American ambition in China through the lens of literature.In the imaginations of early Americans, the Middle Kingdom was the wealthiest empire in the world. Its geographical distance did not deter commercial...

Text: English, German (translation)

Francophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation were faced with an impossible dilemma. How could they redefine their culture, and the ‘humanity’ they felt had been denied by the colonial project, in terms that did not replicate the...

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a...

Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's house after his death in 2005, Map Drawn by a Spy is the world-renowned writer's autobiographical account of the last four months he spent in his country. In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante...

What is fame? A name? A face? The "it" in "making it"? In this wide-ranging and ambitious book, Leo Braudy traces the evolving definition of fame from the time of Homer to the present. As Braudy points out, fame is far from just a 20th-century obsession:...

A bold new history showing that the fear of Communism was a major factor in the outbreak of World War IIThe Spectre of War looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a masterful new...

The critical story of thirteen empires, showing their key role in the foundation of today’s global civilization. For over five hundred years, empires have been a feature of the political landscape, and today, many contemporary conflicts resonate with...

Throughout Western history, there have been those who felt compelled to share a dissenting opinion on public matters, while still hoping to avoid the social, political, and even criminal consequences for exercising free speech. In this collection of...

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalismDuring and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects...

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalismDuring and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects...