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A sweeping assessment of the entire career of Frank Furness that features more than one hundred illustrations, George E. Thomas's book argues that modern American architecture, in design and genealogy, is rooted in the industrial culture of Philadelphia and the office of Frank Furness.
Financial crises happen time and again in post-industrial economies—and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable.A Brief History of Doom examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and China—including the Great Depression and the economic meltdown of 2008. Vague demonstrates that the over-accumulation of private debt does a better job than any other variable of explaining and predicting financial crises. In a series of clear and gripping chapters, he shows that in each case the rapid growth of loans produced widespread overcapacity, which then led to the spread of bad loans and bank failures. This cycle, according to Vague, is the essence of financial crises and the script they invariably follow.The story of financial crisis is fundamentally the story of private debt and runaway lending. Convinced that we have it within our power to break the cycle, Vague provides the tools to enable politicians, bankers, and private citizens to recognize and respond to the danger signs before it begins again.
James Bernard Murphy challenges widely shared assumptions about personhood and its development through discrete stages, arguing they undermine our ability to see our lives as a whole. Drawing on classic and contemporary thinkers, Murphy argues that we live our whole lives as children, adolescents, and adults all at the same time.
Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror examines the ways Christian theology has shaped centuries of violence from Christianity's first centuries up to our own day, through the crusades, the French Revolution, and more recent American wars.
Political Corruption considers the different ways in which a metaphor of impurity, disease, and dissolution was deployed by political philosophers from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It argues that speaking coherently about political corruption in our present moment requires a robust account of the good regime.
In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe over the long eighteenth century, characterized by stories about heroines who transcend their gendered destiny.
Focusing on such popular figures as the stage Jew, Scot, and Irishman, Michael Ragussis reveals the crucial role the theater played in developing, maintaining, and questioning the ethnic stereotypes through which the identity of the English nation was defined.
In Levinas's Politics, Annabel Herzog argues that Levinas's Talmudic readings embody a political pragmatism which complements, revises, and challenges the ethical analyses he offers in his phenomenological works.
Amid thorny issues of translation and appropriation, imperial rivalry, the rise of commercial authorship, and anxieties about authenticity, Barbara Fuchs traces how early modern English writers borrowed Spanish literary models, triumphantly reimagining the transnational appropriation as heroic looting.
Daniel Cottom traces the vagabond word "bohemia" as it migrated across national borders over the course of the nineteenth century-from France to the United States, England, Italy, Spain, and Germany-and how it was transformed, contested, or rejected along the way.
Saladin M. Ambar's innovative study is the first book to explicitly credit governors with making the presidency what it is today. This book explodes the idea that the modern presidency began after 1945, instead placing its origins squarely in the Progressive Era.
In this wry and insightful memoir, distinguished American diplomat John Paton Davies, Jr. describes his upbringing and wartime adventures in Asia, encounters with key twentieth-century figures from Mahatma Gandhi to Joseph Stalin, and how he carried on after his Foreign Service career was cut short by McCarthyism.
This book examines charisma as the force in art, literature, and film that engages the reader's or viewer's consciousness and inspires admiration and imitation. Thirteen chapters analyze the workings of charisma and its effects, ranging from Homer to Woody Allen.
Thomas Prendergast's Poetical Dust offers a provocative and far-reaching analysis of Poets' Corner. Covering nearly a thousand years of political and literary history, the book examines the chaotic, sometimes fitful process through which Britain has consecrated its poetry and poets.
In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols examines the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy, ultimately arguing that this belief in the utility of nuclear force is misguided and dangerously obsolete.
Examining the shift between American immigrant policy between 1924 and 1964, Ellis Island Nation traces the emergence of "contributionism," the belief that the newcomers from eastern and southern Europe contributed important cultural and economic benefits to American society.
Our Emily Dickinsons situates Dickinson's life and work within larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America. Examining Dickinson's influence on Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and others, Vivian R. Pollak complicates the connection between authorial biography and poetry that endures.
In The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-1924, Robert E. Hannigan challenges the conventional belief that the United States entered World War I only because its hand was forced and disputes the claim that Washington was subsequently driven by a desire "to make the world safe for democracy."
The Integrated Self is a book in which Stock continues his project of reading Augustine, and one in which he moves forward in new and perhaps unexpected directions.
In an exploration of antitheatrical incidents from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates that at the heart of antitheatrical disputes lies a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.
Examining the writings of twentieth-century thinkers such as Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik, Faces of Moderation argues that moderation remains crucial for today's encounters with new forms of extremism.
In the Shadow of the Gallows reveals how a sense of racialized culpability shaped Americans' understandings of personhood prior to the Civil War. Jeannine Marie DeLombard draws from legal, literary, and popular texts to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.
As the first major study of Shakespeare's Birthplace during the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's Shrine draws on extensive archival research to describe the invention of the Birthplace in the Victorian period, when the site was purchased for the nation, extensively restored, and transformed into a major tourist attraction.
In A Theater of Diplomacy, Ellen R. Welch argues that theater served not merely as a decorative accompaniment to negotiations, but rather underpinned the practices of embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship that constituted the culture of diplomacy in the early modern period.
Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.
In the decades after U.S. independence, American novelists carried on an argument that pitted direct democracy against the representative liberalism they attributed to their British counterparts. The result was an American novel distinguished by its use of narrative tropes that generated a social system resembling today's distributed network.
Roberto Garvia explores the history of artificial spoken or written languages and the people who fought for them. Taking the three most prominent-Volapuk, Esperanto, and Ido-Garvia investigates what drove so many to invest incredible energy and time to learn and promote them.
Can we come to know what is good and evil, right and wrong in our age of science? In The Socratic Turn, Dustin Sebell looks to Socrates, the founder of political philosophy, for guidance.
Fateful Transitions offers a new perspective on the debate about China's ascendance and the global power shift. The book examines how democratic nations have navigated the rise of other states from 1895 to the present and explains what today's leaders can learn from history.
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