The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, the schools, and the cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party pro...

In the midst of the Great Depression, the American government initiated one of the most ambitious national photographic projects ever undertaken. Such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks-all then virtually unknown-were com...

In this fascinating new history, Judith Stein argues that in order to understand our current economic crisis we need to look back to the 1970s and the end of the age of the factory – the era of postwar liberalism, created by the New Deal, whose pract...

Thorstein Veblen is best known for his authorship of "The Theory of the Leisure Class" and "The Theory of Business Enterprise", which made him a celebrated figure in the fields of economics and sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. In this...

This book explores the historical insights of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia's most celebrated poet and arguably its greatest thinker. Svetlana Evdokimova examines for the first time the full range of Pushkin's fictional and nonfictional writi...

What can a fingernail tell us about the mysteries of creation? In one sense, a nail is merely a hunk of mute matter, yet in another, it's an information superhighway quite literally at our fingertips. Every moment, streams of molecular signals direct...

The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something other people don't have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable kind of inspiration that permits the artist to exceed his own abilities. It is as if the artist is sud...

"Picasso and Braque" offers an intimate look at one of the most pivotal exchanges in the history of Western art: the culminating two years (1910-12) of Analytic Cubism. While the Cubist experiment has long been a requisite chapter in the history of m...

How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particular...

The Swami Vivekananda's speech to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 is the centrepiece of Indian artist Jitish Kallat's new work, "Public Notice 3". The installation went on view at the Art Institute of Chicago on September 11, 2...