- Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva
- Robert Kingdon
- In Calvin's Geneva, the changes associated with the Reformation were particularly abrupt and far-reaching, in large part owing to John Calvin himself. This book makes two major contributions to our understanding of this time: the first is to the history of divorce itself; the second is in illustrating the operations of the Consistory of Geneva.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1995
- All on a Mardi Gras Day
- Reid Mitchell
- With this colorful study, Reid Mitchell takes us to Mardi Gras--to a yearly ritual that sweeps the richly multicultural city of New Orleans into a frenzy of parades, pageantry, dance, drunkenness, music, sexual display, and social and political bombast. Mitchell tells us some of the most intriguing stories of Carnival since 1804 and he examines the meaning and messages of Mardi Gras.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1999
- The Animal Estate
- Harriet Ritvo
- Hardcover 1987 / Paperback
- Avant-Garde Florence
- Walter Adamson
- They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure.
- Hardcover 1993
- Berlin Cabaret
- Peter Jelavich
- Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. Fads and fashions, sexual mores, and political ideologies--all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of German history.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- Beyond Suffrage
- Susan Ware
- The New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt brought an unprecedented number of women to Washington to serve in positions of power and influence. Beyond Suffrage is a study of women who achieved positions of national leadership in the 1930s. Susan Ware discusses the network they established, their attitudes toward feminism and social reform, and the impact they had upon the New Deal's social welfare policies and on Democratic party politics.
- Hardcover 1981 / Paperback
- Closer to the Masses
- Matthew Lenoe
- Matthew Lenoe traces the origins of Stalinist mass culture to newspaper journalism in the late 1920s. In examining the transformation of Soviet newspapers during the New Economic Policy and the First Five Year Plan, Lenoe tells a dramatic story of purges, political intrigues, and social upheaval. Deeply researched and lucidly written, this book is a major contribution to the literature on Soviet culture and society.
- Hardcover 2004
- Conflicting Paths
- Harvey J. Graff
- Spanning more than two centuries, this book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America that includes analysis and five hundred first-person testimonials--autobiographies, diaries, and letters.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover
- The Culture of Love
- Stephen Kern
- The Culture of Love interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over.
- Paperback 1998 / Hardcover
- Dry Manhattan
- Michael A. Lerner
- In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- France after Revolution
- Denise Z. Davidson
- In this well-researched work, Davidson provides a reevaluation of prevailing views on the effects of the French Revolution, and particularly on the role of women. Arguing against the idea that women were forced from the public realm of political discussion, Davidson demonstrates how women remained highly visible and active. On a broader level, France after Revolution sheds light on how a changing society progressed in a time of unprecedented sociopolitical experimentation.
- Hardcover 2007
- Horses
- Catherine Johns
- The remarkable relationship between people and horses has been evoked in art from the beginning of the bond between them. In this beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Johns explores the horse in art from the ancient world to the modern era. From the Horse of Selene to Persian miniatures and prints by Duerer, Stubbs, and Hokusai, this book will inform, entertain, and delight horse lovers and all readers interested in this inspiring animal and its profound contribution to human culture.
- Hardcover 2007
- Life and Death in the Third Reich
- Peter Fritzsche
- Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life.
- Hardcover 2008
- London
- Roy Porter
- This is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern colossus. Not since ancient times has there been such a city--not eternal, but vibrant, living, full of a free people ever evolving. In this transcendent book, Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with brio and wit.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1998
- Patriotism on Parade
- Wallace Evan Davies
- Davies here recounts, in fascinating detail, the activities and attitudes of both veterans' and hereditary patriotic societies in America up to 1900. In a lively manner, he explores their significance as social organizations, their concept of patriotism, and their influence upon public opinion and legislation.
- Hardcover 1955
- Rise of Respectable Society
- F. M. L. Thompson
- One of England's grand masters of history provides a clear and persuasive interpretation of the creation of "respectable society" in Victorian Britain. Thompson covers not only the economy, social structure, and patterns of authority, but also marriage and the family, childhood, homes and houses, work and play.
- Hardcover 1988 / Paperback 1990
- The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany
- Michael C. Carhart
- In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."
- Hardcover 2008
- Songs of Ourselves
- Joan Shelley Rubin
- In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.
- Hardcover 2007
- Soulstealers
- Philip A. Kuhn
- Midway through the reign of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, Hungli, mass hysteria broke out among the common people. It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men's queues (the braids worn by royal decree) and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of
- Paperback / Hardcover
- This Was America
- Oscar Handlin
- Hardcover 1949
- Ways of Lying
- Perez Zagorin
- The religious persecution and intellectual intolerance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries compelled many heterodox groups and thinkers to resort to misdirection, hidden meaning, secrecy, and deceit. In this highly unusual interpretation, Zagorin traces the theory and practice of religious leaders, philosophers, intellectuals, and men of letters who used deception to cloak dissident beliefs.
- Hardcover 1990