Books published by Cornell University Press

Sara Beam, in revealing how theater and politics were intimately intertwined, shows how the topics we joke about in public reflect and shape larger religious and political developments.

All of us take our moral bearings from a conception of the good, or a range of goods, that we consider most important. We are in this sense selves in moral space. Building on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, among others, David Parker...

In the decade before the Civil War, Concord, Massachusetts, was a center of abolitionist sentiment and activism. To Set this World Right is the first book to recover and examine the voices, events, and influence of the antebellum antislavery movement...

This useful manual provides a means for easy identification of the native and cultivated conifers of northeastern North America. The territory covered is roughly eastern Canada and the northeastern fourth of the United States, from Maine south to the...

John G. Fitch's new Latin text of Seneca's play, Hercules Furens, is based on a collation of the chief manuscripts, including the Paris manuscript T.

Bittner explores how the neighborhood changed during the period of ideological relaxation under Khrushchev that came to be known as the thaw.

Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown...

In the wake of the Terror, France's political and intellectual elites set out to refound the Republic and, in so doing, reimagined the nature of the political order. They argued vigorously over imperial expansion, constitutional power, personal...

This collection of essays explores the origins and roles of Southeast Asian business groups, especially as they developed during the 1970s and 1980s. An important contribution to studies of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia. Includes a...

This study of nineteenth-century Vietnam focuses on interactions between the Vietnamese king, Minh Mang, and the heterogeneous southern region of the country, which he sought to bring more firmly under state control through a series of polices...

This account focuses on the Dobama Movement, the radical group led by Burmese intellectuals who struggled for their country's unity and independence. Khin Yi focuses on the years 1930 to 1938 and recounts the movement's founding by Thakin Ba Thoung...

This work argues that anthropologists have observed and recorded religious rites and rituals but have largely ignored the role of religion when constructing an analytical framework. The author contends that religious phenomena are inextricably...

The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth collects 31 letters that William Wordsworth exchanged with his wife, Mary, during the early years of their marriage.

Offers a fresh perspective on the rich and brilliant art of the Florentine Renaissance. Focusing on a number of works, by such masters as Botticelli and Michelangelo, this book explains each piece in terms of what it meant to the people who produced it and to those for whom they made it.

Robert Jervis argues here that the possibility of nuclear war has created a revolution in military strategy and international relations. He examines how the potential for nuclear Armageddon has changed the meaning of war, the psychology of...

The anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred square miles of rugged hills stretching between Tower City and Carbondale, harbored coal deposits that once heated virtually all the homes and businesses in Eastern cities. At its peak...

Schaffer reveals how tinkering with the electoral process, even with the best of intentions, can easily damage democratic ideals.

Chodat exposes a major shortcoming in recent accounts of twentieth-century discourse, arguing that what is often seen as the "death" of agency is better described as the displacement of agency onto new and varied entities.

Eade has checked the dates of more than 250 inscriptions from Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. He reproduces old calendrists' calculations for each year from AD 638 to 2000. The introduction provides an outline of the calendrical system and an...

A study of rapid capitalist development in Thailand and the rivalries generated not only between the older bureaucracy and the newer, rising entrepreneurial elite, but also between urban and rural entrepreneurs. Girling explores the classic problems...

A concise treatment of presidential power by a brilliant writer is once again made available with the reissue of this book, first published in 1951.

The Novgorod region of Russia is a sparsely populated area about the size of Ireland better known for its medieval archaeology and folklore than for anything else. Although Novgorod began the post-Soviet period with no unusual endowment of natural or...

Conflict between labor and capital reflects the competitive and conflict-laden relations within the working class itself, Peter Swenson maintains. Fair Shares examines the internal conflicts of organized labor regarding distribution of wages in order to explain both union leaders' market-structuring objectives in the "political economy", and...

"Herzen's novel played a significant part in the intellectual ferment of the 1840s. It is an important book in social and moral terms, and wonderfully expressive of Herzen's personality."-Isaiah Berlin Alexander Herzen was one of the major figures in...

This revisionary study offers a convincing new interpretation of Jeffersonian Republican thought in the 1790s. Based on extensive research in the newspapers and political pamphlets of the decade as well as the public and private writings of party...

Writers as diverse as Carolivia Herron, Charles Johnson, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott have addressed the history of slavery in their literary works. In this groundbreaking new book, Arlene R. Keizer contends that these writers...

Isle of the Saints recreates the harsh yet richly spiritual world of medieval Irish monks on the Christian frontier of barbarian Europe. Lisa Bitel draws on accounts of saints' lives written between 800 and 1200 to explain, from the monks' own...