New deal ruins

race, economic justice, and public housing policy

Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades ...

To follow in their footsteps

the Crusades and family memory in the High Middle Ages

When the First Crusade ended with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, jubilant crusaders returned home to Europe bringing with them stories, sacred relics, and other memorabilia, including banners, jewelry, and weapons. In the ensuing decades, the memory of the crusaders' bravery and pious sacrifice ...

Freedom burning

anti-slavery and empire in Victorian Britain

After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave ...

Targeting civilians in war

Accidental harm to civilians in warfare often becomes an occasion for public outrage, from citizens of both the victimized and the victimizing nation. In this vitally important book on a topic of acute concern for anyone interested in military strategy, international security, or human rights ...

The mind of Thucydides

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly's Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving ...

Women and aristocratic culture in the Carolingian World

Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L ...

The making of a Christian Empire

Lactantius and Rome

The work of the Christian scholar Lactantius provides an ideal lens through which to study how Rome became a Christian empire. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser shows how Lactantius' Divine Institutes-seditious in its time-responded to the emperor Diocletian's persecution and then became an important influence on ...

Idols in the East

european representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450

Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols ...

Francis of Assisi

a new biography

Among the most beloved saints in the Catholic tradition, Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) is popularly remembered for his dedication to poverty, his love of animals and nature, and his desire to follow perfectly the teachings and example of Christ. During his lifetime and after ...

America's first Great Depression

economic crisis and political disorder after the panic of 1837

For a while, it seemed impossible to lose money on real estate. But then the bubble burst. The financial sector was paralyzed and the economy contracted. State and federal governments struggled to pay their domestic and foreign creditors. Washington was incapable of decisive action. The ...

The money laundry

regulating criminal finance in the global economy

A generation ago not a single country had laws to counter money laundering; now, more countries have standardized anti-money laundering (AML) policies than have armed forces. In The Money Laundry, J. C. Sharman investigates whether AML policy works, and why it has spread so rapidly ...

One billion hungry

can we feed the World?

Hunger is a daily reality for a billion people. More than six decades after the technological discoveries that led to the Green Revolution aimed at ending world hunger, regular food shortages, malnutrition, and poverty still plague vast swaths of the world. And with increasing food ...

The business of empire

United Fruit, race, and U.S. expansion in Central America

The link between private corporations and U.S. world power has a much longer history than most people realize. Transnational firms such as the United Fruit Company represent an earlier stage of the economic and cultural globalization now taking place throughout the world. Drawing on ...

Books as weapons

propaganda, publishing, and the battle for global markets in the Era of World War II

"John B. Hench's invaluable book helps to fill in another piece in the jigsaw of war. It brilliantly assays the high ambitions governments, publishers, and organizations had for the book as a repository and an arrowhead of civilization and education in World War II---and ...

Albert Camus

elements of a life

On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris's Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been ...

Islam in the World today

a handbook of politics, religion, culture, and society

Eds. Werner Ende, Udo Steinbach.

Sorry States

apologies in international politics

Enlightening the World

the creation of the Statue of Liberty

Conceived in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the grief that swept France over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Statue of Liberty has been a potent symbol of the nation's highest ideals since it was unveiled in 1886. In Enlightening the ...

Sacred gifts, profane pleasures

a history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic World

Occupational hazards

success and failure in military occupation