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In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published...

Many assume that in international politics, and especially in war, "anything goes." Civil War general William Sherman said war "is all hell." The implication behind the maxim is that in war, as in hell, there is no order, only chaos; no mercy, only...

Rape, claims Ann J. Cahill, affects not only those women who are raped, but all women who experience their bodies as rapable and adjust their actions and self-images accordingly. Rethinking Rape counters legal and feminist definitions of rape as mere...

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy.

Although the role of shared speech in political action has received much theoretical attention, too little thought has focused on the practice of listening in political interaction, according to Susan Bickford. Even in a formally democratic polity...

How does a written literature come into being within an oral culture, and how does such a literature achieve and maintain its authority? Joseph Falaky Nagy addresses those issues in his wide-ranging reading of the medieval literature of Ireland, from...

Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the political and cultural significance of the sciences. He provides an alternative understanding of science that focuses on practices rather than knowledge.Rouse first outlines the shared...

The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"-allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view...

Jack Snyder's analysis of the attitudes of military planners in the years prior to the Great War demonstrates that it is not only rational analysis that determines strategic doctrine, but also the attitudes of military planners.

Arctic Mirrors is a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind.

Lucan's great poem, Pharsalia, recounts events surrounding the decisive battle fought near Pharsalus in 48 B.C. during the civil war between the forces of Pompey and Julius Caesar. Though the subject of this unfinished masterpiece is historical, many...

Gregory Nagy here provides a far-reaching assessment of the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Greek society. Nagy illuminates in particular the forces of interaction and change that transformed the Indo-European linguistic and cultural heritage...

This book presents translations of three dialogues Xenophon devoted to the life and thought of his teacher, Socrates. Each is accompanied by notes and an interpretative essay that will introduce new readers to Xenophon and foster further reflection in...

Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass...

Calculating Credibility examines-and ultimately rejects-a fundamental belief held by laypeople and the makers of American foreign policy: the notion that backing down during a crisis reduces a country's future credibility. Fear of diminished...

In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union.

Mueller argues that war is an idea, like dueling or slavery, that has been substantially discredited, reduced to its remnants-or dregs-and thugs are the residual combatants.

Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the United States was embroiled in competitive inter-state politics. Although it did not directly involve itself in European affairs, the United States did engage regularly in dangerous struggles with...

What strategic behavior is appropriate for a state as powerful as the U.S.? To answer this question, Robert J. Art concentrates on "grand strategy"-the deployment of military power in both peace and war to support foreign policy goals.

The state's policy with regard to fathers and fatherhood had a great impact on concepts of citizenship and gender in France in the era of the two World Wars. Drawing on new material that has only recently become available from the archives of the...

Thomas G. Mahnken sheds light on the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence-gathering, tracing how America learned of military developments in Japan, Germany, and Great Britain in the period between the two world wars.

Many know the name Uncas only from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, but the historical Uncas flourished as an important leader of the Mohegan people in seventeenth-century Connecticut. In Uncas: First of the Mohegans, Michael Leroy...

Accessible and attractive narratives, linked by brief historical overviews, provide a large and fully textured view of Korea under Japanese rule.

Oral epic poetry is still performed by Turkic singers in Central Asia. On trips to the region, Karl Reichl collected heroic poems from the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Karakalpak oral traditions. Through a close analysis of these Turkic works, he shows that...

Mitrovich argues that the Cold War policy of containment was only the first step in America's clandestine campaign to destroy Soviet power, revealing a range of previously unknown covert actions launched during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? U.S...

Several hundred thousand members of the Red Army were stationed in East Germany when that state was reunited with its western counterpart. The peaceful transfer of these soldiers to their homeland produced a welcome outcome to a potentially explosive...

In his recent book Against Liberalism, philosopher John Kekes argued that liberalism as a political system is doomed to failure by its internal inconsistencies. In this companion volume, he makes a compelling case for conservatism as the best...

With the publication of Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, widely considered a classic in Modern Greek studies and in collateral fields, Margaret Alexiou established herself as a major intellectual innovator on the interconnections among ancient...