Books

The Avars arrived in Europe from the Central Asian steppes in the mid-sixth century CE and dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe for almost 250 years. Fierce warriors and canny power brokers, the Avars were more influential and durable than...

Resilience beyond Rebellion addresses a critical question in insurgency studies: Why some rebel groups successfully become political parties, while others die trying. Only half of rebel groups with political aspirations manage to reinvent themselves as...

Trade in War is an urgent, insightful study of a puzzling wartime phenomenon: states doing business with their enemies. Trade between belligerents during wartime should not occur. After all, exchanged goods might help enemies secure the upper hand on the...

Women and the Jet Age is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation...

The Greater Second World War challenges the traditional temporal and geographic frameworks of World War II, expanding the timeline to include a series of regional conflicts and revolutions that began in 1931 and continued into the mid-1950s. These...

Heidegger provides a lively and accessible introduction to one of the most influential and intellectually demanding philosophers of the modern era. Covering the entire range of Heidegger's thought but focusing on his key work, Being and Time, Richard...

In Words of War, Eric Min pulls back the curtain on when, why, and how belligerents negotiate while fighting. Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus...

Dangerous Snakes of Australia is an indispensable field guide to all 150 identified species of venomous elapid snakes on the continent. Through detailed species accounts, Mike Swan introduces readers to the physical features, habitat, behavior, and other...

Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political...

States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d'etat, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign...

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900 weaves scholarly commentary with...

Acclaimed Beatles historian Kenneth Womack offers the most definitive account yet of the writing, recording, mixing, and reception of Abbey Road. In February 1969, the Beatles began working on what became their final album together. Abbey Road introduced...

Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie...

Known for her short stories populated by a recurring cast of headstrong, honest, and sometimes outrageous Southern women characters, Ellen Gilchrist's (1935-2024) four decades of writing and twenty-six works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry solidly...

The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning builds an innovative framework for analyzing one of the most prominent genres in twenty-first-century Hollywood. In combining theories of adaptation with close textual analysis, James C. Taylor...

Contributions by Vlad Dima, Laura Hatry, Alicia Kozma, Lynette Kuliyeva, Madhuja Mukherjee, Frank Percaccio, Gary D. Rhodes, Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen, Marlisa Santos, Michael L. Shuman, and Robert Singer Movie posters, regardless of their country of...

Over the past thirty years, Stephen King has received enormous attention from both the popular press as well as academics seeking to explain the unique phenomenon of his success. Books on King explore his canon in religious contexts, in political and...

The first book-length work of its kind, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation examines the shift in the young adult book market towards increased representation of transgender characters and authors. Through a comprehensive...

Contributions by Yoshiko Akamatsu, Carol L. Beran, Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, Allison McBain Hudson, Kate Lawson, Jessica Wen Hui Lim, Lindsey McMaster, E. Holly Pike, Katharine Slater, Margaret Steffler, and Anastasia Ulanowicz Lucy Maud Montgomery...

In the wake of George Floyd's murder in May 2020, protests broke out in Minneapolis and quickly spread across the United States. National unrest led to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and added to calls for justice in other American...

Out of the Blue: Life on the Road with Muddy Waters begins with a moment lifted from a young musician's dreams. Brian Bisesi, a guitarist barely out of his teens, is invited on stage to fill in for a missing member of the band backing blues legend Muddy...

Robert Dance's new evaluation of Joan Crawford looks at her entire career and-while not ignoring her early years and tempestuous personal life-focuses squarely on her achievements as an actress, and as a woman who mastered the studio system with a rare...

Long before anyone had heard of alien cookbooks, gremlins on the wings of airplanes, or places where pig-faced people are considered beautiful, Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer in American television. As creator, host, and primary writer for...

Bertrand Tavernier (b. 1941-2021) was widely considered to be the leading light in a generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s in the wake of the New Wave. In just over forty years, he directed twenty-two feature films in an...

Contributions by Christina M. Chica, Kathryn Coto, Sarah Park Dahlen, Preethi Gorecki, Tolonda Henderson, Marcia Hernandez, Jackie C. Horne, Susan E. Howard, Peter C. Kunze, Florence Maaetita, Sridevi Rao, Kallie Schell, Jennifer Patrice Sims, Paul...

Throughout the history of slavery, enslaved people organized resistance, escape, and rebellion. Sustaining them in this struggle was their music, some examples of which are sung to this day. While the existence of slave songs, especially spirituals, is...

Lauren Bacall (1924-2014), or Betty, as she was known to friends, was one of the last great movie stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her career spanned seven decades and was one of the longest and most distinguished in the history of show business...

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews...

A first-ever book on the subject, New York City Blues: Postwar Portraits from Harlem to the Village and Beyond offers a deep dive into the blues venues and performers in the city from the 1940s through the 1990s. Interviews in this volume bring the...

Contributions by Megan De Roover, Jennifer Harrison, Sarah Jackson, Zoe Jaques, Nada Kujund?Yi?c, Ivana Milkovi?c, Niall Nance-Carroll, Perry Nodelman, David Rudd, Jonathan Chun Ngai Tsang, Nicholas Tucker, Donna Varga, and Tim Wadham One hundred years...

From the late 1920s through the thirties, Greta Garbo (1905-1990) was the biggest star in Hollywood. She stopped making films in 1941, at only thirty-six, and thereafter sought a discreet private life. Still, her fame only increased as the public and...

Be forewarned that this book honors people like the woman in my hometown who paints the numbers of her favorite NASCAR drivers on her elephant ears, and a Tokyo gardener with over a hundred bonsai plants."" So says renowned garden journalist Felder...

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist,...

Alabama Quilts: Wilderness through World War II, 1682-1950 is a look at the quilts of the state from before Alabama was part of the Mississippi Territory through the Second World War - a period of 268 years. The quilts are examined for their cultural...

Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing...

Steve Ditko (1927-2018) is one of the most important contributors to American comic books. As the cocreator of Spider-Man and sole creator of Doctor Strange, Ditko made an indelible mark on American popular culture. Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and...

Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller's Friday the 13th franchise is one of the most successful horror film franchises in history. To date, it includes twelve movies, a television show, comic books, and video games, among other media. In See! Hear! Cut!...

Contributions by Paul Fisher Davies, Lisa DeTora, Yasemin J. Erden, Adam Gearey, Thomas Giddens, Peter Goodrich, Maggie Gray, Matthew J. A. Green, Vladislav Maksimov, Timothy D. Peters, Christopher Pizzino, Nicola Streeten, and Lydia Wysocki. Recent...

In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the...

While growing up in rural Indiana during World War II, William Fagaly began his first venture - collecting and selling earthworms to locals - from which he was christened with a childhood moniker. The Nightcrawler King: Memoirs of an Art Museum Curator...

Contributions by Kenneth Baker, Jaqueline Berndt, Albert Boime, John Carlin, Benoit Crucifix, David Deitcher, Michael Dooley, Damian Duffy, M. C. Gaines, Paul Gravett, Diana Green, Karen Green, Doug Harvey, Charles Hatfield, M. Thomas Inge, Leslie Jones,...

As only an accomplished author, consummate collector, and savvy insider can, John Kobal tells the story of the man who invented Hollywood, Cecil Blount DeMille. Kobal narrates the story of DeMille's life and follows the director's career from his first...

Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach, originally published in French as Analyser le jazz, is available here in English for the first time. In this groundbreaking volume, Laurent Cugny examines and connects the theoretical and methodological...

Because of his lengthy screen resume that includes almost eighty appearances in such movies as Camille and Waterloo Bridge, as well as a marriage and divorce to actress Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor was a central figure of Hollywood's classical era...

Contributions by Ofra Amihay, Madeline Backus, Samantha Baskind, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Scott S. Elliott, Assaf Gamzou, Susan Handelman, Leah Hochman, Leonard V. Kaplan, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Shiamin Kwa, Samantha Langsdale, A. David Lewis, Karline McLain,...

Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis's watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew. Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned...

Over nearly sixty years, Agnes Varda (b. 1928) has given interviews that are revealing not only of her work, but of her remarkably ambiguous status. She has been called the ""Mother of the New Wave"" but suffered for many years for never having been...

Dale Scott's career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his...