The 217 previously unpublished cuneiform texts presented here, found in small collections throughout the world, date from the late third to the late first millennia BCE and include inscriptions, letters, administrative documents, and literary works i...

From nineteenth-century paintings of fires raging through New York City to scenes of Manhattan engulfed by a gigantic wave in the 1998 movie "Deep Impact", images of the city's end have been prolific and diverse. Why have Americans repeatedly imagine...

Award-winning anthropologist Parker Shipton brings a variety of persepectives-philosophical, political, and religious-and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa.

Did Britain's permissive society start with swinging London? This exciting new account of 1950s London challenges the sexual myth of the 1960s, arguing that its roots lay further back in the city's dramatic cultures of austerity and affluence that ma...

How do experts spot masterpieces? Paintings are not always signed or noted in historical records, so how can we tell an obscure gem from an altered image? Scientists, conservators and art historians use a range of methods to examine the physical natu...

Formerly part of the popular "Pocket Guides" series, "Allegory" is published in a new edition as "A Closer Look", with a wealth of beautiful reproductions. This informative guide helps readers understand the language of allegory within Western painti...

Formerly part of the popular "Pocket Guides" series, "Angels" is published in a new edition as "A Closer Look", with a wealth of beautiful reproductions. This informative guide helps readers identify angels and their significance in a painting – be i...

Christen Kobke (1819-1848) was arguably the greatest painter of Denmark's "Golden Age", the period of the nation's supreme artistic achievement. He had the remarkable ability to invest the simplest corner of town or countryside with charm and delicac...

Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was – as it remains for all Muslims – the colour of Paradise, reserved for...

This lively book traces the development of American conservatism from Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster to William F. Buckley, Jr. and Irving Kristol. Conservatism has assumed a variety of forms, historian Patrick Allitt argues, because it has be...