"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose—with sympathy or...

During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds—geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to...

Skin, Steven Connor argues, has never been more visible. The Book of Skin explores the multiple functions of the skin in the cultures of the West. In this vividly illustrated book, Connor draws on evidence from a variety of sources including literary...

Christopher R. Martin argues that the mainstream news media (and the large corporations behind them) put the labor movement in a bad light even while avoiding the appearance of bias. Martin has found that the news media construct "common ground"...

"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good—or very bad—has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total...

Soviet official culture underwent a dramatic shift in the mid-1930s, when Stalin and his fellow leaders began to promote conventional norms, patriarchal families, tsarist heroes, and Russian literary classics. For Leon Trotsky—and many later...

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States is an extraordinarily synthetic intellectual tour de force. Kam Shapiro uses the body as a lens to focus on often-overlooked dimensions of modern sovereignty. He provides a novel perspective on one of the most...

Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and...

Knight looks at the different manifestations of Robin Hood at different times and places in a mythic biography with a thematic structure. Each of the book's four central chapters identifies a particular model of the hero, mythic or biographic.

The Japanese government seeks to influence the use of leisure time to a degree that Americans or Europeans would likely find puzzling. Through tourism-promotion initiatives, financing for resort development, and systematic research on recreational...