"Attack on Aristocratic Vice" examines the outrage against – and attempts to end – the four vices associated with the aristocracy in 18th century in England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. All four, it was commonly believed, owed their or...

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo's "Black Picket Fences" explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a...

"Perhaps",‌ wrote Ralph Ellison more than seventy years ago, "the zoot suit contains profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power". ‌ As Ellison noted then, many of our most munda...

This is an account of industrialized killing from a participant's point of view. The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day – one e...

Toronto prides itself on being "the world's most diverse city", and its officials seek to support this diversity through programs and policies designed to promote social inclusion. Yet this progressive vision of law often falls short in practice, lim...

The implicit questions that inevitably underlie German bioethics are the same ones that have pervaded all of German public life for decades: How could the Holocaust have happened? And how can Germans make sure that it will never happen again? In "Rea...

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career,...

In 1982, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Amy Rowley, a deaf six-year-old, was not entitled to have a sign language interpreter in her public school classroom. Lawrence Siegel wholeheartedly disagrees with this decision in his new book "The...

For sale in CIS only! Ironic and humorous, witty and self-deprecatory, "The Afghan Rumour Bazaar" reveals the quotidian absurdities of lives framed against the backdrop of a savage war. Offering daringly new perspectives on a country readers may err...

Why do young men born in many small villages in Spain tend, at the end of the twentieth century, to stay there, often remaining unmarried, while young women from the same villages tend to leave? In "Gender, Work and Property", Nancy Konvalinka explor...