Books By Newest

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, ...

As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a “vital spark,” and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik L. Peterson tells the forgotten story of ...

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; Insurgent Veins challenges ...

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 ...

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 ...

“If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders,” Ayn Rand wrote, “it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—like an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests ...

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 ...

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 the Brazilian monarchy that had declared its ...

Investigations of Nature takes us on a guided tour through history, when voyages of exploration and exploitation were tied to technological advances in navigation and warfare; religious unity was broken with huge political, economic, and intellectual consequences; and the new art of printing led to an explosion of information. After ...

Guantánamo sits at the center of two of the most vexing issues of US policy of the past century: relations with Cuba and the Global War on Terror. It is a contested, extralegal space. In A New No-Man’s-Land, Esther Whitfield explores a multilingual archive of materials produced both ...

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research mixed with archival work, Immigrants, Brokers, and Literacy as Affinity explores literacy’s entanglement in networks of economic and political forces. Ligia A. Mihut proposes and theorizes the figure of the literacy broker, embodied by those who help immigrants with reading and writing ...

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 ...

Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a ...

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 ...

In the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as ...