British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade w...

Taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamin's seminal 1931 essay, the "Unpacking My Library" series charts a spirited exploration of the reading and book collecting practices of today's leading thinkers. "Artists and Their Books" showcases the person...

Western intellectuals have long theorized that religion would undergo a process of marginalization and decline as the forces of modernity advanced. Yet recent events have disrupted this seductively straightforward story. As a result, while it is clea...

"Pollock's Modernism" provides a new interpretation of the art of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), one that is based on a phenomenological investigation of the pictorial effects of particular paintings. Focusing on major works that span the artist's care...

Partially deaf due to a childhood illness, Gerald Shea is no stranger to the search for communicative grace and clarity. In this eloquent and thoroughly researched book, he uncovers the centuries-long struggle of the Deaf to be taught in sign languag...

For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent s...

Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. He pioneered the introduction of the use of language in the visual, probing the way they relate to one another...

A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact. This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968....

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Auste...

An international team of biologists, philosophers, and historians of science explores the critically important process of replication in biological and biomedical research. Without replication, the trustworthiness of scientific research remains in d...