Books

In the eighteenth century, malaria was a prevalent and deadly disease, and the only effective treatment was found in the Andean forests of Spanish America: a medicinal bark harvested from cinchona trees that would later give rise to the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1751, the Spanish Crown asserted control over the ...

Radiation Evangelists explores X-ray and radium therapy in the United States and Great Britain during a crucial period of its development, from 1896 to 1925. It focuses on the pioneering work of early advocates in the field, the “radiation evangelists” who—motivated by their faith in a new technology, trust in new ...

Winner, 2021 CCL J. B. Jackson Book Prize | Winner, 2020 Jon Gjerde Prize from the Midwestern History Association Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the ...

In the early twentieth century, the Ford Motor Company built an industrial empire with massive factory complexes and associated infrastructures. Henry Ford’s 1915 plan to decentralize industrial manufacturing relied on moving key technical processes closer to sites of resource extraction while distributing elements of production. In Fordism and the City, ...

Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct ...

Translated by Nathan Fields The selected poetry of Milan Děžinský, translated by Nathan Fields, including many poems previously not published in English by the celebrated Czech poet.

The poems in with snow pouring southward past the window turn with and for relatives and beloveds across seas and oceans, continents and nations, languages and histories. In this collection, public and personal archives work with literary translations across several dialects of the Inupiaq language, and re-complexify Arctics at a ...

Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Written in part during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s speaker calls on an intertextual constellation of artists as they attempt to wade through agoraphobia, parse out their relationship with God, and navigate falling in love. Overall, the ...

Around the turn of the century, a wave of leftist governments spread across Latin America. Paul W. Posner revisits this movement and diagnoses the reasons for its failure to achieve traditional leftist goals, such as reducing inequality, increasing inclusion of marginalized groups, and strengthening social solidarity. He investigates two sets ...

Fire is both destructive and regenerative; at times vengeful, at others cleansing. The first mention of fire in Genesis comes after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods for humankind. Fire becomes metaphorically layered—as knowledge, as desire, as anger. The ...

The 499 letters in the fourteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall cover a number of particularly intense and acrimonious disputes. More notably, this volume spans the period of the composition, delivery, and furious reaction to Tyndall’s famous—or, more accurately, infamous—Belfast Address. This prestigious lecture, which he ...

Since the first world’s fair in London in 1851, at the dawn of the era of industrialization, international expositions served as ideal platforms for rival nations to showcase their advancements in design, architecture, science and technology, industry, and politics. Before the outbreak of World War II, countries competing for leadership ...

Is photography a Eurocentric practice that others its subjects? In Exposing the Nation, Matthias Pfaller makes the case with a review of a national historiography of photography and images produced in Chile over the course of a century. There are multiple photographies, and they have a variety of uses: science, ...

Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente’s editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, ...

Steeplechase explores multiple landscapes, including Mississippi and its many church steeples; countries known and unknown; cities and inhabitants both aspirational and lost. Its voice is humorous, bewildered, disillusioned, hopeful. The book’s temporal setting is the two years of extra life granted a partner after catastrophic illness and surgery: love’...