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Best known for her novels, Toni Morrison enters the realm of literary criticism to draw attention to the often overlooked significance of race in literature.

Published in 1938, The Black Jacobins tells the story of the only successful slave revolution in history-an uprising inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. The long struggle of African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804.

Before the publication of Nature's Metropolis in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, each following separate lines of development and maturity.

In 1963's The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan challenged the vision 1950s America had of itself as a nation of happy housewives and contented families. After World War II, society had fostered the idea that women wanted to run a home and live through the achievements of a husband and children.

One of America's foremost statesmen, Henry Kissinger was interested in how different countries, in different periods, in all parts of the globe have attempted to impose order on an often chaotic world. World Order sets out his understanding of how we make sense of the world politically.

The United States has the world's largest prison population, with more than two million behind bars. Alexander says this is mainly due to America's 'war on drugs,' launched in 1982. In The New Jim Crow, she explains how this government initiative has led to America's black citizens being imprisoned on a colossal scale.

War Without Mercy examines Japanese-American relations during World War II and investigates links between popular culture, stereotypes, and extreme violence. Dower argues that the concept of racism-used equally by both sides-underpinned the military conflict and led to a particularly brutal war in the Pacific and East Asia.

Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings between 1500 and 1800 in both Europe and Asia. Many thinkers previously believed that Europe's distinctive history-particularly the rise of capitalism-had created the revolutions that launched its path to global supremacy.

Postmodernist thinkers consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something dependent on historians' own interpretations of the past. Evans, however, argues that we can trust history and it is possible to be objective about what happened and what caused it to happen.

MacLeod's 1987 work, ground-breaking for the way it combines field research with theory, follows the lives of two groups of young men from a low-income housing project in the Boston area to show how poor people who aspire to live the American Dream face many more obstacles than their middle-class counterparts.

Our Common Future, produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission, responded to a growing number of environmental concerns faced by the global community.

Born in 1961, US anthropologist and activist David Graeber was weaned on leftist politics, and declared himself an anarchist at age 16. He became an anthropology professor, and his early cultural research in Madagascar exposed him to poverty that he saw as caused by pressures to repay excessive government debt.

Elizabeth Loftus' 1979 work explains why people sometimes remember events inaccurately and how this simple fact has a profound impact on the criminal justice system, especially given the value placed on eyewitness accounts. Although, as these are based on memories that are not always reliable.

Written amid the political fallout and 'war on terror' following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York-Dabashi's adopted city-in 2001, Iran: A People Interrupted offers an insider's insight into the Iranian psyche.

In their 1990 work, Gottfredson and Hirschi introduce a new and comprehensive theory of crime. At the time, crime researchers tended to focus on environmental factors that led to crime, not on the criminals themselves, and were inclined to think about crime only from their particular academic perspective.

In the 1960s, researchers began to understand memory as operating under two systems: a short-term one handling information for mere seconds, and a long-term one for managing information indefinitely. Short-term memory, they found, wasn't simply a 'filing cabinet,' but appeared to work on cognitive tasks.

In Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani challenges dominant views of the crisis of postcolonial Africa, particularly that the problems the continent faces are home grown. Citizen and Subject insists that the current crisis is the institutional legacy of colonialism.

In Collapse, Diamond identifies five factors he believes determine the success or failure of all human societies throughout history. Asking first why societies collapse, he explores various examples of failed societies, from the Norsemen of Scandinavia to the 18th century inhabitants of Easter Island.

Hobson's 1902 book presents a controversial interpretation of Britain's motivations to conquer foreign lands in the nineteenth century. He proposed that ultra-wealthy financiers consciously worked to manipulate political leaders so they could invest money and sell goods in the new outposts of their country's empire.

In His book Gender and the Politics of History (1998), Scott draws attention to the fact that despite gender equality's long-term recognition there has been no genuinely revolutionary change unlike economic, social, and class inequalities.

Published in 1776, when America was teetering on the brink of war with Britain, Common Sense galvanized the colonists and George Washington's army, influencing not only the course of the Revolutionary War, but also the resultant government.

The idea of evolution and that earth's species descended from common ancestors had already been around for some time when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. What was new about his work was that it explained evolution, using a theory called natural selection.

Lewis's 1952 Mere Christianity-originally printed in pamphlet form during World War II-documents a complex journey from atheism to faith. Lewis's fresh, lively, and often humorous presentation of Christian doctrine helped to make him arguably the greatest defender of Christianity of the 20th century.

In The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss elevates a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, examining the ways gifts are given and received.

Do we need religion to be good people? When Immanuel Kant tackled this question in 1793, he produced a book that remains a key text in the shaping of Western religious thought.

The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve.

Philip Zimbardo is fascinated by why people can behave in awful ways. uSome psychologists believe those who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees.

Westad's seminal 2005 work shifts the focus of Cold War studies from Europe to the post-World War II interventions by both the Soviet Union and the United States in the affairs of developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.