In recent years, social scientists have engaged in a deep debate over the methods appropriate to their research. Their long reliance on passive observational collection of information has been challenged by proponents of experimental methods designed...

With the publication of "Boys and Girls" in 1984, Vivian Gussin Paley took readers inside a kindergarten classroom to show them how boys and girls play – and how, by playing and fantasizing in different ways, they work through complicated notions of...

Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" is widely recognized as a cult classic. Despite mixed critical reception, the dark and difficult movie mesmerized audiences at the time of its initial screening in 1968 and went on to become one the highest g...

The Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Summer of Love – the1960s were one of the most turbulent decades in US history. These years launched an unprecedented public debate over the meaning of "America", dividing...

Questions of national identity have long dominated China's political, social, and cultural horizons. So in the early 1900s, when diverse groups in China began to covet foreign science in the name of new technology and modernization, questions of nati...

For centuries, people have been thinking and writing – and fiercely debating – about the meaning of marriage. Just a hundred years ago, Progressive era reformers embraced marriage not as a time-honored repository for conservative values, but as a too...

The Roma or Romani people, commonly called gypsies, comprise one of the largest ethnic minorities in the European Union, with significant populations in the Balkan Peninsula as well as Spain, France, Russia, and the Ukraine. Persecution of the Roma d...

Written by one of the country's foremost urban historians, "The Great Rent Wars" tells the fascinating but little-known story of the battles between landlords and tenants in the nation's largest city from 1917 through 1929. These conflicts were trigg...

The distinctive American tradition of civil disobedience stretches back to pre-Revolutionary War days and has served the purposes of determined protesters ever since. This stimulating book examines the causes that have inspired civil disobedience, th...

European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm – one that has affecte...