Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with...

This book brings new attention to Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957), the wide-ranging Jewish thinker and scholar who taught at Brandeis University in the 1950s. At the heart of Myers’ book is a chapter that Rawidowicz wrote as a coda to his Hebrew tome...

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel...

Aveni (astronomy and anthropology, Colgate) traces the development of Western timekeeping systems, comparing it to those of pre-Columbian America and of tribal societies. Discusses linear and cyclic approaches, and the relationship between timekeeping...

The well-known historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell here advances a radically new interpretation of the founding of modern Israel. The founders claimed that they intended to create both a landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist...

Discusses archaeological evidence concerning the Israelites exodus from Egypt, and explains how Biblical events have been dated

In Phantoms of Remembrance, Patrick Geary makes important new inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, vividly evoking the everyday lives of eleventh-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past...

Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series...

A studio executive leaves his family and travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to hide for 20 years.“You won’t be able to put down this exhilarating debut novel... brave and touching.”—Marie ClaireIn her...

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated...

This classic collection of essays by E.P. Thompson, one of England’s most renowned socialist voices, remains a staple text in the history of Marxist theory. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Thompson’s famous polemic against Louis Althusser and what...

This book chronicles the exploitation of Beethoven's life and work by German political parties from the founding of the modern nation to the East German Revolution of 1989. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped archival resources, David B. Dennis...

Another rediscovered masterpiece from the author of Embers: an erotically charged novel–written within the framework of historical reality–about Casanova’s fateful encounter with the woman who finally defeats him.In 1756 Giacomo Casanova escaped from the...

The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Children of Time brings us an extraordinary space opera about humanity on the brink of extinction, and how one man's discovery will save or destroy us all. The war is over. Its heroes forgotten. Until one...

A second volume in the acclaimed history of the legendary banking dynasty chronicles the changing fortunes of the financial family during a turbulent era in world history, from their dramatic influence in nineteenth-century Europe to their gradual...