Books published by Cornell University Press

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century.Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades.The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball.

Why did the Peace of Nicias fail to reconcile Athens and Sparta? In the third volume of his landmark four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan examines the years between the signing of the peace treaty and the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 413 B.C. The principal figure in the narrative is the Athenian politician and general Nicias, whose policies shaped the treaty and whose military strategies played a major role in the attack against Sicily.

The first volume of Donald Kagan's acclaimed four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War offers a new evaluation of the origins and causes of the conflict, based on evidence produced by modern scholarship and on a careful reconsideration of the ancient texts. He focuses his study on the question: Was the war inevitable, or could it have been avoided?Kagan takes issue with Thucydides' view that the war was inevitable, that the rise of the Athenian Empire in a world with an existing rival power made a clash between the two a certainty. Asserting instead that the origin of the war "e;cannot, without serious distortion, be treated in isolation from the internal history of the states involved,"e; Kagan traces the connections between domestic politics, constitutional organization, and foreign affairs. He further examines the evidence to see what decisions were made that led to war, at each point asking whether a different decision would have been possible.

This book, the second volume in Donald Kagan's tetralogy about the Peloponnesian War, is a provocative and tightly argued history of the first ten years of the war. Taking a chronological approach that allows him to present at each stage the choices that were open to both sides in the conflict, Kagan focuses on political, economic, diplomatic, and military developments. He evaluates the strategies used by both sides and reconsiders the roles played by several key individuals.

"This book of essays explores connections between Hamilton: The Musical and contemporary legal issues"--

New York City is defined by a certain kind of grit and perseverance, its history sprinkled with stories of unlikely successes found where most would not have thought to go. The flora and fauna of the five boroughs are no exception, and Wildflowers of New York City introduces us to some of the over 2,000 wildflowers that eke out an existence there.Andrew Garn's stunning photography invites us to look, and then look again¿to appreciate the marvels that we might have otherwise passed by. Through his lens, the humble burdock and chicory become works of art. Pokeweed assumes an ethereal beauty. Wildflowers of New York City encourages readers to take the time to notice the hidden, to seek out and reflect on the overlooked beauty in crowded spaces, and to wonder at these tenacious plants that thrive and prosper in ways and places we might never expect.Contributors Allison C. Meier, Donald J. Leopold

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form-and even at times becomes a formalism itself-but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment.As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms-spatial form, pure form, and formlessness-and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

Fields of Gold critically examines the history, ideas, and political struggles surrounding the financialization of farmland. In particular, Madeleine Fairbairn focuses on developments in two of the most popular investment locations, the US and Brazil, looking at the implications of financiers' acquisition of land and control over resources for rural livelihoods and economic justice. At the heart of Fields of Gold is a tension between efforts to transform farmland into a new financial asset class, and land's physical and social properties, which frequently obstruct that transformation. But what makes the book unique among the growing body of work on the global land grab is Fairbairn's interest in those acquiring land, rather than those affected by land acquisitions. Fairbairn's work sheds ethnographic light on the actors and relationships-from Iowa to Manhattan to Sao Paulo-that have helped to turn land into an attractive financial asset class.

In this edited collection, 17 internationally known authorities bring together the results of recent research on the natural history, ecology, behavior, morphology, and genetics of wasps as they pertain to the evolution of social behavior.

"A critical examination of the American conservative movement, with special emphasis on its development as a media phenomenon. As a whole, the book's argument is that the movement is neither conservative nor really a movement at all but a conglomeration of interests whose sponsors pay celebrities for promoting their causes"--

In Moral Commerce, Julie L. Holcomb traces the genealogy of the boycott of slave labor from its seventeenth-century Quaker origins through its late nineteenth-century...

How are alliances made? In this book, Stephen M. Walt makes a significant contribution to this topic, surveying theories of the origins of international alliances and identifying the most important causes of security cooperation between states. In...

Now back in print after more than two decades, this classic and still-accurate account of the behavior patterns and sensory capacities of the honeybee remains a book "written with a simplicity, directness, and charm...."-Yale Review

Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" brings together in one volume translations, commentaries, and essays that illuminate the background of Giambattista Vico's major work.

Most accounts explain the postwar globalization of financial markets as a product of unstoppable technological and market forces. Drawing on extensive historical research, Eric Helleiner provides the first comprehensive political history of the phenomenon, one that details and explains the central role played by states in permitting and encouraging financial globalization.Helleiner begins by highlighting the commitment of advanced industrial states to a restrictive international financial order at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and during the early postwar years. He then explains the growing political support for the globalization of financial markets after the late 1950s by analyzing five sets of episodes: the creation of the Euromarket in the 1960s, the rejection in the early 1970s of proposals to reregulate global financial markets, four aborted initiatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s to implement effective controls on financial movements, the extensive liberalization of capital controls in the 1980s, and the containment of international financial crises at three critical junctures in the 1970s and 1980s.He shows that these developments resulted from various factors, including the unique hegemonic interests of the United States and Britain in finance, a competitive deregulation dynamic, ideological shifts, and the construction of a crisis-prevention regime among leading central bankers. In his conclusion Helleiner addresses the question of why states have increasingly embraced an open, liberal international financial order in an era of considerable trade protectionism.

Uncovers firsthand accounts of women's experiences in 18th-century Dutch Asia. This book argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia.

Examines the forces that attracted many social and intellectual leaders of 18th-century Russia to Freemasonry as an instrument for change and progress. The author reveals how Freemasonry became a part of a larger social transformation that saw the development of literary circles and social clubs.

Via rigorous study of the legal arguments Spain developed to justify its acts of war and conquest, The Other Side of Empire illuminates Spain's expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Andrew Devereux proposes and explores an important yet hitherto unstudied connection between the different rationales that Spanish jurists and theologians developed in the Mediterranean and in the Americas.Devereux describes the ways in which Spaniards conceived of these two theatres of imperial ambition as complementary parts of a whole. At precisely the moment that Spain was establishing its first colonies in the Caribbean, the Crown directed a series of Old World conquests that encompassed the Kingdom of Naples, Navarre, and a string of presidios along the coast of North Africa. Projected conquests in the eastern Mediterranean never took place, but the Crown seriously contemplated assaults on Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine. The Other Side of Empire elucidates the relationship between the legal doctrines on which Spain based its expansionary claims in the Old World and the New.The Other Side of Empire vastly expands our understanding of the ways in which Spaniards, at the dawn of the early modern era, thought about religious and ethnic difference, and how this informed political thought on just war and empire. While focusing on imperial projects in the Mediterranean, it simultaneously presents a novel contextual background for understanding the origins of European colonialism in the Americas.

"Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer is a personal and scholarly examination of the violent confrontations in Charlottesville and the University of Virginia campus in the summer of 2017, focusing on the clash between free speech and protection of civil rights and human dignity"--

"This book presents readers with a new way of thinking about religious doubt through an ethnographic exploration of how Ahmadi Muslims in India--members of a minority's minority--confront an impossible question: how do I prove that I'm Muslim"--

"Shows how a group of nurse practitioners expand the medical encounter to include a mix of health, social, and coordination problems--illustrating the ways in which these providers are not just filling-in for absent physicians, but are filling in for the absence of the state in attending to the problems of poverty and unequal access to health care"--

"Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in northwestern Bangladesh, this book examines social entrepreneurship through the set of economic processes that animate the delivery of social-enterprise models and enmesh the social identities of poor women entrepreneurs, front-line enterprise workers, and the development elite"--

"An account of the central tradition in the history of philosophy, Platonism, along with the class of philosophical positions collectively known as Naturalism and the 'anti-Platonism' of Naturalism both in antiquity and in contemporary philosophy"--

"Examining the experiences of Italian nationals repatriated from the African and Balkan territories Italy lost with the defeat of fascism, this study rethinks the genesis of both the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization"--