Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down...
Civil Wars A History in Ideas
We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and isn't, have a long and contested history. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war "civil" often depend on whether one is ruler or rebel, victor or...
Cy Twombly Fifty Days at Iliam
This revelatory publication provides a comprehensive and multifaceted account of Cy Twombly's masterpiece Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), a series of ten paintings based on Alexander Pope's 18th-century translation of Homer's Iliad. Essays by a team of both...
Domina The Women Who Made Imperial Rome
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero – these are the names history associates with the early Roman Empire. Yet, not a single one of these emperors was the blood son of his predecessor. In this captivating history, a prominent scholar of...
Kremlin Letters Stalin's Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt
Stalin exchanged more than six hundred messages with Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. In this riveting volume – the fruit of a unique British-Russian scholarly collaboration – the messages are published and also...
Little History of Economics
A lively, inviting account of the history of economics, told through events from ancient to modern times and the ideas of great thinkers in the field. What causes poverty? Are economic crises inevitable under capitalism? Is government intervention in...
Little History of Philosophy
Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them...
Obsession Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection
Evocative and often highly erotic works on paper by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso are presented along with new details about Scofield Thayer (1889-1982), the unusual and complicated man who collected them. Thayer was a wealthy publisher,...
Reformations The Early Modern World, 1450-1650
A lively, expansive history of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the momentous changes they set in motion This fast-paced survey of Western civilization's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to...
Vory Russia's Super Mafia
Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes...