Editing is an invisible art where the very best work goes undetected. Editors strive to create books that are enlightening, seamless, and pleasurable to read, all while giving credit to the author. This makes it all the more difficult to truly under…
Illuminates the creative moments of the major traditions from prehistoric times through classical Greece arguing that religious values and meaning grew with social and technological innovation
'I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell', writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. "The Tacit Dimension", originally published in 1967…
Just as a traveler crossing a continent won't sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can't grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data n…
Designed to help students learn how to think about research projects, this guide offers suggestions which cover four broad areas of social science: the creation of the "imagery" to guide research; methods of "sampling" to generate maximum variety in…
Scholar and magician, Siegel uncovers the age-old practices of magic in sacred rites and rituals and unveils the contemporary world of Indian magic of street and stage entertainers. Siegel's journeys take him from ancient Sanskrit texts to the slums…
For more than thirty years, Writing for Social Scientists has been a lifeboat for writers in all fields, from beginning students to published authors. It starts with a powerful reassurance: Academic writing is stressful, and even accomplished schola…
"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus / and its devastation." For sixty years, that's how Homer has begun the Iliad in English, in Richmond Lattimore's faithful translation-the gold standard for generations of students and general reade…
When Kate L. Turabian first put her famous guidelines to paper, she could hardly have imagined the world in which today's students would be conducting research. Yet while the ways in which we research and compose papers may have changed, the fundame…
Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy - everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis…
Anthony C. Yu's translation of "The Journey to the West", initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, "The Journey to the West"…
The U.S. and the U.K. have become nations of stringent social control, from surveillance to curtailment of civil liberties. "The culture of control" charts the evolution of this approach to law and order.
Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until the publication in 2007 of Guy Raffa's "Guide to the Inferno", students…
Human rights law and the legal protection of women from violence are still fairly new concepts. As a result, substantial discrepancies exist between what is decided in the halls of the United Nations and what women experience on a daily basis in the…
People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers…
Through the first half of the twentieth century, emotions were a legitimate object of scientific study across a variety of disciplines. After 1945, however, in the wake of Nazi irrationalism, emotions became increasingly marginalized and postwar rat…
For over fifty years, numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories p…
In this lavishly illustrated, first-ever book on how spider webs are built, function, and evolved, William Eberhard provides a comprehensive overview of spider functional morphology and behavior related to web building, and of the surprising physica…
When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals a…
"She fought a lonely and almost single-handed fight, with the single-mindedness of a crusader, long before men or women of any race entered the arena; and the measure of success she achieved goes far beyond the credit she has been given in the histo…
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives…
Analyzes the myths concerning cooked food, the seasons, water, the stars, and other subjects in the culture of the Bororo Indians of Brazil
From the 1890s through World War II, the greatest hopes of American progressive reformers lay not in the government, the markets, or other seats of power but in urban school districts and classrooms. The Importance of Being Urban focuses on four wes…
This highly regarded volume was the first to explore the doctrine of prophetic revelation, a critical and definitive area of Islamic religious and political thought. In it, the esteemed Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman traces the inception of this doct…
At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mond…
Merchants' shouts, jostling strangers, aromas of fresh fish and flowers, plodding horses, and friendly chatter long filled the narrow, crowded streets of the European city. As they developed over many centuries, these spaces of commerce, communion,…
Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Alice Goffman spent six years living i…
The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood…
Separating hype from fact, this text investigates the fate of embodiment in the information age. It relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material fo…
Few ideas in the past century have had wider financial, political, and governmental impact than that of economic growth. The common belief that endless economic growth, as measured by Gross Domestic Product, is not only possible but actually essenti…
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors D…
A library is not just a collection of books, but also the buildings that house them. As varied and inventive as the volumes they hold, such buildings can be much more than the dusty, dark wooden shelves found in mystery stories or the catacombs of s…
"The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it's never gone away. We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool…
One of the world's foremost experts on Assyriology, Jean Bottero has studied the religion of ancient Mesopotamia for more than fifty years. Building on these many years of research, Bottero here presents the definitive account of one of the world's…
Admirably clear, concise, down-to-earth, and powerful - all too often, legal writing embodies none of these qualities. Its reputation for obscurity and needless legalese is widespread. Since 2001 Bryan A. Garner's "Legal Writing in Plain English" ha…
In "Love Stories" Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the 19th century - including those of Abraham Lincoln - drawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, d…
For a century and a half the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken's "booboi…
Arthur L. Stinchcombe has earned a reputation as a leading practitioner of methodology in sociology and related disciplines. Throughout his distinguished career he has championed the idea that to be an effective sociologist, one must use many method…
This classic study still provides one of the most astute descriptions available of an often misunderstood subculture: that of fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Alan Fine immerses himself in several different gaming systems, of…
My verse resembles the bread of Egypt - night passes over it, and you cannot eat it any more. Devour it the moment it is fresh, before the dust settles upon it. Its place is the warm climate of the heart; in this world it dies of cold. Like a fish i…
N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking how we use cognitive processes that are inaccess…
Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens ev…
When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg. That's Milton Mayer, writing in a for…
Discusses the conflict between subjective time and historical time, looks at how fiction and historical writings create a model of temporal experience, and considers the question of sense and reference
We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress w…
The philosophy of medicine has become a vibrant and complex intellectual landscape, and Care and Cure is the first extended attempt to map it. In pursuing the interdependent aims of caring and curing, medicine relies on concepts, theories, inference…
