An eminent scholar finds a new American history in the Hispanic past of our diverse nation.The United States is still typically conceived of as an offshoot of England, with our history unfolding east to west beginning with the first English settlers in...

"A remarkably complex portrait of Aretha Franklin's music and her tumultuous life." --Rolling StoneAretha Franklin began life as the golden daughter of a progressive and promiscuous Baptist preacher. Raised without her mother, she was a gospel prodigy...

A richly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world.The twentieth century produced a galaxy of extraordinary Jewish historians. Gershom Scholem stands out among them for the richness and power of his historical...

George McClure offers here a far-reaching analysis of the role of consolation in Italian Renaissance culture, showing how the humanists' interest in despair, and their effort to open up this realm in both social and personal terms, signaled a shift...

A richly textured account of what it means to be poor in AmericaBaltimore was once a vibrant manufacturing town, but today, with factory closings and steady job loss since the 1970s, it is home to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in America...

This book is an examination of natural law doctrine, rooted in the classical writings of our respective three traditions: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Each of the authors provides an extensive essay reflecting on natural law doctrine in his tradition...

Even two hundred years after Abraham Lincoln's death, we, like Walt Whitman, "love the President personally."In a stunning feat of scholarship, insight, and engaging prose, Lincoln's Body explores how a president ungainly in body and downright "ugly" of...

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral...

Krazy & Ignatz: Komplete 1927-1928

"Daring, dazzling . . . a tough, funny, heart-breaking book." --Seattle Times "[A] refreshing statement of honesty and endurance ...funny, brave full of heart and willing to say things about war and disease, sexual and cultural politics that have rarely...

When first published in 1977, A Literature of Their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the...

Examples, crucial links between discourse and society's view of reality, have until now been largely neglected in literary criticism. In the first book-length study of the rhetoric of example, John Lyons situates this figure by comparing it with more...

Peter Smith has written a comprehensive and in-depth study of the structure and more important of the transformation of the national political elite in twentieth-century Mexico. In doing so, he analyzes the long-run impact of the Mexican Revolution of...

From 1900 to 1924 Spain experienced a stage of vigorous academic freedom and unfettered scientific inquiry that strikingly contrasted with the repressive atmosphere of the periods before and after. Thomas Glick explores this "recovery of science" by...

Despite their hopeful aspirations to wholeness in life and spirit, Thomas McFarland contends, the Romantics were ruins amidst ruins," fragments of human existence in a disintegrating world. Focusing on Wordsworth and Coleridge, Professor McFarland shows...

"Every poet has one or two compulsive themes," writes Leonard Nathan. "One of mine is how to make things fit together that don't but should; the other is getting down far enough below a surface to see if something is still worth praising. Over the years...

Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for the prevalence of...

Historians have frequently portrayed Italian anarchism as a marginal social movement that was doomed to succumb to its own ideological contradictions once Italian society modernized. Challenging such conventional interpretations, Nunzio Pernicone...

In this unprecedented work on the status and role of intellectuals in Soviet political life, a former Soviet sociologist maps out the delicate, often paradoxical, ties between the political regime and the creative thinkers who play a major part in the...