Books

AI Through the Experts’ Eyes reveals the humanity behind artificial intelligence. John R. Gallagher foregrounds practitioners’ stories and the real-life culture from which these disruptive technologies emerge. Representing reality to computers is at the heart of AI, and Gallagher spotlights the challenges of doing so under the combined pressures of ...

Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge against human populations. Practitioners had little success in mitigating the symptoms of the disease, and its causes were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role in the sites where outbreaks occurred. In this ...

The novel emerged in lockstep with the nation-state, serving as the cultural counterpart to political form in the modern era. However, these dynamics are unraveling as the raison d’être of the contemporary state veers from its people to the neoliberal market. In Novel Distortions, Tamara L. Mitchell analyzes recent (1996–2019) ...

Architects, politicians, and planners have repeatedly framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper, rather than integral components of the urban landscape with their own layered histories and often unrealized potentials. Describing a site as a bidonville––the francophone equivalent of the shantytown––...

Mapping Medical Modernity explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the ...

To disappear meant to die. In those days, in that place, almost everyone knew. With sentences that cut clean to the bone and wrench the heart, Patricia Grace King invites us to comprehend the traumas of wartime and the legacies they create. As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the ...

The Holocaust in Croatia recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein grounded their study in extensive research in previously closed archives, aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich ...

Ana Forcinito explores how testimonial voices have played a pivotal role in the fight for justice, memory, and gender rights. Through the concept of diffraction, she examines how these voices move through and reshape barriers to construct sonic spaces that connect bodies and create spaces for listening. While Argentina is ...

Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their ...

Shortlist, 2025 Architectural Book Award in Architectural Theory To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular ...

A man of many talents—naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, and political commentator—Alfred Russel Wallace made seminal contributions to science in the nineteenth century. With Wallace in the Field, Victor Rafael Limeira-DaSilva unpacks the early life of one of the most beloved and famous Victorian scientific figures. Focusing on Wallace’s ...

Beginning in the fall of 1920, Aleksandr Antonov led an insurgency that became the largest armed peasant revolt against the Soviets during the Civil War. Yet by the summer of 1921, the revolt had been crushed, and popular support for the movement had all but disappeared. Until now, details of this conflict ...

At the end of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh led the nation in glass production. Glass bottle plants relied heavily on adolescent boys for their manufacturing process. These “glass house boys” worked both day and night, as plants ran around the clock to meet production demands and remain competitive with their ...

The Language Movement in Bangladesh charts the Bangla Language Movement from a rhetorical perspective. Following Partition in 1947, major conflicts over land, religion, power, and language characterized the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan. The debate over recognizing Bangla as a state language in East Pakistan was particularly consequential. Lasting ...

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure, showing how the built environment of the railways ...