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The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The technological marvel highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This frenzy for balloon experiments fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. This book explores how this flying machine not only expanded the audience for science but also inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon was a people-machine that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation.

Repositions Peruvian indigenismo as a discourse of and about modernity, in which the movement’s artists and intellectuals used the figure of the Indian to mobilize larger questions about becoming modern.

A Tribute to the Communicative Practices of Physicists in the Twentieth Century

Poems That Urgently Remind Us Love Keeps Us Alive

Choi Chatterjee analyzes both Bolshevik attitudes towards women and the invented state rituals surrounding Women’s Day to demonstrate the ways these celebrations helped construct gender notions in the Soviet Union.

Curative Powers combines post-colonial theory with ethnographic research to reconstruct how the Soviet government used medicine and public health policy to transform the society, politics, and culture of its outlying regions, specifically Kazakhstan.

Winner of the 2003 Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Full of wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty, these poems trace the timelines of Kercheval’s life forward and backward, offering a moving examination of the connections that bind us together into families and communities.

In Natural Causes, a collection haunted by death, compassion, and love, the penchants for metaphor and resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever.

Reveals the history and death of the Soviet Union’s peaceful use of nuclear power through exploration of both the projects and the technocratic and political elite who were dedicated to increasing state power through technology. Paul Josephson illuminates the problems that can befall any society heavily invested in large-scale technology.

Sarah Robbins identifies and defines a new genre in American letters—the domestic literacy narrative—and provides a cultural history of its development throughout the nineteenth century.

Winner of an Outstanding Academic Title Award from Choice Magazine (2006).

Looking mainly at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster examines the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from “being South African”, and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa.

A comprehensive literary and social history of sexual attitudes and mores in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, that reveals the complex and often contradictory impulses and ideas that permeated the culture.

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.

In this original cultural history, Ernesto Capello analyzes the formation of memory, myth, and modernity through the eyes of Quito’s diverse populations. By employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes, Capello views the configuration of time and space in narratives that defined Quito’s identity and its place in the world. To Capello, these tropes began to crystallize at the end of the nineteenth century, serving as a tool for distinct groups who laid claim to history for economic or political gain during the upheavals of modernism.

Winner of the 1996 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

To author Edith Pearlman, “The stories in Vaquita aim at an intimacy between writer and reader. That imagined reader wants to know who loves whom, who drinks what, and, mostly, who answers to what summons. Thank Heavens for Spike Lee! Before his movies writers and critics had to natter about moral stances; now I can say with a more tripping tongue that my characters are people in peculiar circumstances, aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they’ll at least Do Their Own Right Thing Right.”