Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Gertrude Stein delivered her "Narration" lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home coun...

In the "Critique of Christian Origins" Abd al-Jabbar – the leading Muslim intellectual of the late tenth century – develops what might be considered the first Islamic history of Christianity, analyzing the Bible, church rituals, and miracles. Unlike...

In "The Metaphysics of Media", award-winning media critic Peter K. Fallon tackles the complicated question of how a succession of dominant forms of media have supported – and even to some extent created – different conceptions of reality. To do so, h...

In Giuseppe Arcimboldo's most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man's chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together...

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture,...

Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics – in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs – have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon W...

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and...

This volume makes available for the first time in English a variety of primary source materials relating to the life and work of Natalia Shelikov, a pioneering nineteenth-century Russian-American businesswoman. As a principal of the Russian-American...

During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women's freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon's wri...

The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing gro...