Books

As rigorous scientific and philosophical discourse circulated during the Enlightenment, aided by the Republic of Letters, a revolutionary understanding of gender emerged that would impact nation building in Europe and the Americas. In From Virile to Sterile, Adriana Novoa analyzes the cosmopolitan citizens of this metaphysical republic—an international community ...

The fifteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall contains 466 letters covering the period from November 1875 to December 1877. Tyndall was by now an established man of science with a far-reaching reputation. The most significant work he undertook in this period involved his experiments on spontaneous generation and his consulting for ...

Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances ...

Empires and Explorations interweaves nineteenth-century Brazilian history, the extraordinary life of Richard Francis Burton, and the use of travel writing by historians. Burton witnessed the origins of the early processes of nation-building in Brazil, including the power and influence of Great Britain on a monarchy that had ruled an independent ...

Social change is a topic of central interest in the social sciences. The upheavals and reforms that swept across former socialist states in Eurasia offer a rich array of case studies to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnically Bulgarian community in rural Ukraine, ...

The astronomy lecturing trade in Britain experienced a theatrical turn in the early 1800s, as practitioners relied on larger and more elaborate visual aids to enhance the scenic and dramatic effects of their traveling spectacles. Commercial and Sublime explores this phenomenon in the long nineteenth century, a time when astronomical ...

Insurgent Veins examines the decolonial ideological bridge between the early twentieth-century indigenista literary tradition and its influence on the consolidation of Indigenous literature, which emerged alongside social mobilizations in Mesoamerica and the Andean corridor. Traditionally, Indigenous and indigenista studies have been treated as separate fields of inquiry; however, Insurgent Veins ...

“I can work best now while peeling potatoes. . . . It is for me what lens-grinding was for Spinoza.”—L. Wittgenstein More than 250 years separate the publication of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Both are considered monumental philosophical treatises, produced during markedly different times in human history, ...

Exotic drugs and spices, from tea to opium, were among the first fruits of European commercial expansion in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth, many had become profitable products of the European empires that had spread across the globe. Often, they were objects of appropriation—substances whose curative virtues were ...

Rehabilitate Marx! conceptualizes new forms of socialist modernity during the post-Stalinist era in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s. After the demise of Stalinism, Czechoslovak intellectuals within the Communist Party realized that the primary challenge they faced wasn’t merely the further development of socialism, which would lead ...

Sanitizing Moscow presents an environmental history of public health reforms in late imperial Moscow between 1870 and 1917. It explores the relationship between Russia’s urban modernization and the more-than-human environment in the context of the major social and political changes, triggered by the liberal reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, and ...

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the ...

Winner, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia 2024 Literary Award for Nonfiction Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) is best known as the author of a travelogue describing his botanizing journey through the American South in the late eighteenth century. Writing was not, however, Bartram’s only or even preferred method of recording the natural ...

While biographers of Andy Warhol have long recognized his mother as a significant influence on his life and art, Julia Warhola’s story has not yet been told. As an American immigrant who was born in a small Carpatho-Rusyn village in Austria-Hungary in 1891, Julia never had the opportunity to develop ...

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Longlist, 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | Winner, Minnesota Book Awards of 2025 | Winner, 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award | Finalist, 2024 Foreword Indies Award | Cowinner, The Boston Globe‘s Best 75 Books of 2024 Winner | The Minnesota Star Tribune Best Book of 2024 | Cowinner, Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024 | Cowinner, ...