Books published by Cornell University Press

In What Universities Can Be, the high-profile educator Robert J. Sternberg writes thoughtfully about the direction of higher education in this country and its potential to achieve future excellence.

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous...

A significant political figure in twentieth-century Russia, Alexander Yakovlev was the intellectual force behind the processes of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) that liberated the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from Communist rule between 1989 and 1991. Yet, until now, not a single full-scale biography has been devoted to...

Presents the first English-language publication of the classical-style poems of Jao Tsung-i (born 1917), a prominent artist-calligrapher, scholar-poet, and polymath living in Hong Kong. Jao's poems in various traditional forms reflect the tumultuous history of twentieth-century China, but also demonstrate the enduring resonance of its classical culture.

The Eurasianist movement was launched in the 1920s by a group of young Russian emigres who had recently emerged from years of fighting and destruction. Drawing on the cultural fermentation of Russian modernism in the arts and literature, as well as in politics and scholarship, the movement sought to reimagine the former imperial space in the...

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roger Martin du Gard was one of the most famous writers in the Western world. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937, and his works, especially Les Thibault, a multivolume novel, were translated into English and read widely. Today, this close friend of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, and Andre Malraux is...

How did enlightened Russians of the eighteenth century understand society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality and justice with the authoritarian political structures in which they lived? Historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how...

Available for the first time in English, Zofia Nalkowska's Boundary was originally published as Granica in Poland in 1935. The modernist novel was widely discussed upon its publication and praised for its psychological realism and stylistic and compositional artistry. Over the years, it has been translated into several languages and made into a...

Imagine a hawk's view of the magnificent bluegrass pastures of Kentucky horse country. Circle around the remnants of a breeding farm, four beautiful horses grazing just beyond the paddock. Inside the ramshackle house, a family is falling apart. Hack, the patriarch breeder and trainer, is aged and blind, and his wife, Louetta, is confined by...

"Doesn't an educated person-simple and working, sick and with a sick child-doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?" Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her...

Sofia Petrovna Svechina (1782-1857), better known as Madame Sophie Swetchine, was the hostess of a famous nineteenth-century Parisian salon. A Russian emigre, Svechina moved to France with her husband in 1816. She had recently converted to Roman Catholicism, and the salon she opened acquired a distinctly religious character. It quickly became...

Joan C. Tronto argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our own fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective.

Priests of Prosperity explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary...

The inhabitants of Vilnius, the present-day capital of Lithuania, have spoken various languages and professed different religions while living together in relative harmony over the years. The city has played a significant role in the history and development of at least three separate cultures-Polish, Lithuanian, and Jewish-and until very...

Finalist, 2015 Midwest Book Award Chicago Book Review Best Book of 2015 Set in the frozen wasteland of Midwestern academia, The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath introduces Wilson A. Lavender, father of three, instructor of women's studies, and self-proclaimed genius who is beginning to think he knows nothing about women. He spends much of his time...

In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.

Tells the story of an isolated Michigan town that becomes the flash-point for some of the principal ideological debates of our day. This story is about the failure of best intentions and the personal freedom of individuals to do good or do harm. It follows characters on both sides of the line.

What explains Eurozone member-states' divergent exposure to Europe's sovereign debt crisis? Deviating from current fiscal and financial views, From Convergence to Crisis focuses on labor markets in a narrative that distinguishes the winners from the losers in the euro crisis.

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post-World War II international leadership appeared to be draining steadily away. Yet just over a decade later, by the early 1990s, America's global primacy had been reasserted in dramatic fashion. The Cold War...

In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.

In Peacemaking from Above, Peace from Below, Norrin M. Ripsman explains how regional rivals make peace and how outside actors can encourage regional peacemaking.

Show business is today so essential to American culture it's hard to imagine a time when it was marginal. But as David Monod demonstrates, the appetite for amusements outside the home developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century. The Soul of Pleasure offers a new interpretation of how the taste for entertainment was cultivated.

In Deadly River, Ralph R. Frerichs tells the story of the Haitian cholera epidemic, of a French disease detective determined to trace its origins so that he could help contain the spread and possibly eliminate the disease, and the political intrigue that has made that effort so difficult.

In the Hegemon's Shadow investigates how the leading state in the international system responds to rising powers in peripheral regions-actors that are not yet and might never become great powers but that are still increasing their strength, extending their influence, and trying to reorder their corner of the world.

In "I Love Learning; I Hate School," Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding.

Jonathan Wyrtzen's Making Morocco is an extraordinary work of social science history. Making Morocco's historical coverage is remarkably thorough and sweeping; the author exhibits incredible scope in his research and mastery of an immensely rich set of materials from poetry to diplomatic messages in a variety of languages across a century of...

Illustrated with high-quality photographs taken on location in the plants' natural environment, this field guide describes more than three hundred species of tropical and subtropical species of fruits, tubers, and spices.

In Chinese Economic Statecraft, William J. Norris introduces an innovative theory that pinpoints how states employ economic tools of national power to pursue their strategic objectives. Norris shows what Chinese economic statecraft is, how it works, and why it is more or less effective.

In The Merchants of Siberia, Erika Monahan reconsiders commerce in early modern Russia by reconstructing the trading world of Siberia and the careers of merchants who traded there. She follows the histories of three merchant families from various social ranks who conducted trade in Siberia for well over a century.