Social and cultural history Books

This unique collaboration by academic historians, Oneida elders, and Episcopal clergy tells the fascinating story of how the oldest Protestant mission and house of worship in the upper Midwest took root in the Oneida community. Personal bonds that...

When the Showers family arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, the railroad had only recently come to town and a modest university was struggling to survive. Having spent the prior 18 years moving from place to place, the family decided to settle down and...

The original book, written long ago, existed, but its sight is hidden from the searcher and the thinker. - The Maya Popol VuhOver the last half century, an abundance of evidence has been put forward to indicate a highly advanced civilization once...

Winner of the Cantemir Prize of the Berendel FoundationEugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the...

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by law(s) in the British Empire. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the authors provide in-depth analyses which shine new light on the role of law in creating the...

In A History of Global Consumption: 1500 - 1800, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe examines the history of consumption throughout the early modern period using a combination of chronological and thematic discussion, taking a comprehensive and wide-reaching view of a...

This lively and original guidebook offers an invitation to the study of Greek philosophy and signposts to lead the student deeper. The reader is drawn in to the questions the philosophers posed. Doing Greek Philosophy conveys a vital sense of the...

Ellen Jordan's treatment of the expansion of middle-class women's work is perhaps the most comprehensive available and is a valuable complement to existing works on the social and economic history of women.

The Father of Jewish Mysticism offers an incisive look at the early life and writings of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), the father of modern Jewish mysticism and a major 20th-century Jewish intellectual. Daniel Weidner offers the first full-length study,...

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Or did they look the...

Food matters, not only as a subject of study in its own right, but also as a medium for conveying critical messages about capitalism, the environment, and social inequality to diverse audiences. Recent scholarship on the subject draws from both a...

This book charts the social and cultural history of the scientific technique known as "tissue culture." It shows how tissue culture was a regular public presence in twentieth-century Britain, and argues that history can contribute to current debates...

Franz Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a...

This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own - in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what...

On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and six men launched their infamous rebellion against slaveholders. The rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, recruiting slaves to their ranks and killing nearly five dozen whites-more than had...

Woman to Woman - Part II is the continuing series about the conversations we never had, need to have, and still can have. It's about growing from girl to woman - living, loving and learning while finding self-worth and dignity in the face of serious...

When Thomas Jefferson travels to Paris in 1784 to negotiate trade treaties for America, he takes the enslaved James Hemings with him as his manservant. Living in Paris, where the French had abolished slavery, Hemings discovers an independence, a skill,...

The Spanish and Portuguese empires that existed in the Americas for over three hundred years resulted in the creation of a New World population in which a complex array of racial and ethnic distinctions were embedded in the discourse of power. During the...

This book offers a history of Japanese television audiences and the popular media culture that television helped to spawn. In a comparatively short period, the television industry helped to reconstruct not only postwar Japanese popular culture, but also...

In the United States, as in many parts of the world, people are discriminated against based on the color of their skin. This type of skin tone bias, or colorism, is both related to and distinct from discrimination on the basis of race, with which it is...

This second edition of An Environmental History of the World continues to present a concise history, from ancient to modern times, of the interactions between human societies and the natural environment, including the other forms of life that inhabit our...

Since it's first publication, Rugby's Great Split has established itself as a classic in the field of sport history. Drawing on an unprecedented range of sources, this deeply researched and highly readable book traces the social, cultural and economic...

Tells the story of Rugby League through times of great social, political and economic upheaval, using previously unexplored archival sources to illuminate the class-conscious structures that shaped the development of the sport.

Adopting a thematic approach to a period of great change and upheaval in Europe, these essays throw new light on developments in society, the economy, politics and culture, fixing them not only in the political framework of the time, but also in their...

This new translation presents two works, one by Epictetus and the other by Cebes, two ancient Greek philosophers of the Imperial period, in new translations of clear, straightforward English.In this book, readers will learn how to...

Between 1977 and 1985, some 20,000 Ethiopian Jews left their homes in Ethiopia and - motivated by an ancient dream of returning to the land of their ancestors, 'Yerussalem' - embarked on a secret and highly traumatic exodus to Israel. Due to various...

Childhood in Ancient Athens offers an in-depth study of children during the heyday of the Athenian city state, thereby illuminating a significant social group largely ignored by most ancient and modern authors alike. It concentrates not only on the...

This crucial period in Russia's history has, up until now, been neglected by historians, but here Brian L. Davies' study provides an essential insight into the emergence of Russia as a great power.For nearly three centuries, Russia vied with the...

This groundbreaking volume explores Plutarch's unique survival in the argument that animals are rational and sentient, and that we, as humans, must take notice of their interests.Exploring Plutarch's three animal-related treatises, as well as passages...

This book provides a uniquely detailed historical account of the discursive processes surrounding the evolution of cultural policies and related institutional structures within a single democratic jurisdiction: the 26-county Irish state that came into...

In this book an international team of contributors - working across Classics, History, Politics, and English - address a range of revolutionary transformations in England, America, France, Italy, and Russia, all of which were accorded the classical...

Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire discusses the significance of parrhēsia (free and frank speech) in Greek culture of the Roman empire.

This volume explores the reception of the classical past in the works of 20th century American dramatist Robert E. Sherwood and his use of the ancient world to critique key events and trends in American history.

This book focuses on the national conceptualization of Judaism and Jews by German neo-Pietists from the early Restoration (1815) until the New Era (neue Ära, 1858-1861), at which point Prussia and other German states embarked on a liberal course. The...

This book explores the intersection between geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. It presents religion as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the socioeconomic...

Philosophy in the American West explores the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western United States, reflecting on the relationship between people and the places that sustain them. 　The American West has long...

Putting technology front and centre in our thinking about law, this book introduces Law 3.0: the future of the legal landscape.Technology not only disrupts the traditional idea of what it is 'to think like a lawyer,' as per Law 1.0; it presents major...

The growing field of Holocaust studies confronts a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, threats of nuclear war, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, and environmental...