Books published by Cornell University Press

Offering new readings of debates within the Wilson, Truman, Nixon, Bush, and Obama administrations, Hemmer asserts that heated debates, disagreements, and even confusions over U.S. grand strategy are not only normal but also beneficial.

To take the measure of literary writing, The Deed of Reading convenes diverse philosophic commentary on the linguistics of literature, with stress on the complementary work of Stanley Cavell and Giorgio Agamben.

In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast...

Chronicling the transformative historical moment when Americans began to reimagine their nation as one strengthened by the diverse faiths of its peoples as liberal Protestant leaders abandoned religious exclusivism and leveraged their considerable cultural influence to push others to do the same.

In The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, Tarik Cyril Amar reveals the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of one of East Central Europe's most important multiethnic borderland cities into a Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. Today, Lviv is the modern metropole of the western part of independent Ukraine and a...

As the site of the assassination that triggered World War I and the place where the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Bosnia has become a global symbol of nationalist conflict and ethnic division. But as Edin Hajdarpasic shows, formative contestations over the region began well before 1914, emerging...

In Deceit on the Road to War, John M. Schuessler examines how U.S. presidents have deceived the American public about fundamental decisions of war and peace. Deception has been deliberate, he suggests, as presidents have sought to shift blame for war onto others in some cases and oversell its benefits in others.

In Emotional Diplomacy, Todd H. Hall explores the politics of officially expressed emotion on the international stage, looking at the ways in which state actors strategically deploy emotional behavior to shape the perceptions of others. Examining diverse instances of emotional behavior, Hall reveals that official emotional displays are not...

Recchia draws on declassified documents and about one hundred interviews with civilian and military leaders to illuminate little-known aspects of U.S. decision making in the run-up to interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq.

Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao is the essential guide for anyone traveling to those islands. It showcases the more than 280 species seen on Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao and provides descriptions of and directions to the best places to bird, from the famous white sand beaches to hidden watering holes to the majestic national parks.

In Out of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party. He traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War.

Many of the world's states are the result of robust national movements that achieved independence. Many other national movements have failed in their attempts to achieve statehood, including the Basques, the Kurds, and the Palestinians. In Rebel Power, Peter Krause offers a powerful new theory to explain this variation.

In Repentance for the Holocaust, C. K. Martin Chung develops the biblical idea of "turning" (tshuvah) into a conceptual framework to analyze a particular area of contemporary German history, commonly referred to as Vergangenheitsbewaltigung or "coming to terms with the past."

In Shaken Authority, Christian P. Sorace examines the political mechanisms at work in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the broader ideological energies that drove them. Sorace takes Communist Party ideas and discourse as central to how that organization formulates policies, defines legitimacy, and exerts its power. Sorace argues...

Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The widespread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country where people's lives were disrupted by the end of the USSR and tens of millions of livestock were killed in devastating droughts in the early...

In Raja Yudhisthira, Kevin McGrath brings his comprehensive literary, ethnographic, and analytical knowledge of the epic Mahabharata to bear on the representation of kingship in the poem.

Cornell '77 is about far more than just a single Grateful Dead concert. It is a social and cultural history of one of America's most enduring and iconic musical acts, their devoted fans, and a group of Cornell students whose passion for music drove them to bring the Dead to Barton Hall.

In History and Its Objects, Peter N. Miller uncovers the forgotten origins of our fascination with exploring the past through its artifacts by highlighting the role of antiquarianism in grasping the significance of material culture.

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan.

In Heroic Sagas and Ballads, Stephen A. Mitchell examines the world of the medieval Icelandic legendary sagas and their legacy in Scandinavia.

Organizations, institutions, and individuals get stuck in spite of their innovative ideas and ambitious agendas. Never has the timing been better for a book that cuts through the theoretical jargon and delineates the exact political and managerial skills leaders need to move agendas forward. Whether you're a team leader trying to lead change...

Central bankers have enjoyed great power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. In Central Banks and Gold, Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler explore how this financialized form of globalism first took shape a century ago.

In Mixed Feelings, Katja Garloff asks what it means for literature (and philosophy) to use love between individuals as a metaphor for group relations.

During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today's border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy-in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers...

In Imagining a Greater Germany, Erin R. Hochman offers a fresh approach to the questions of state- and nation-building in interwar Central Europe.

In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England's rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature.

In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. In this book, Daniela Sandler introduces the concept of counterpreservation as a way to understand this intentional appropriation of decrepitude.

Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post-Soviet Russia.

Many authoritarian leaders want nuclear weapons, but few manage to acquire them. Autocrats seeking nuclear weapons fail in different ways and to varying degrees-Iraq almost managed it; Libya did not come close. In Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer compares the two failed nuclear weapons programs.

In Salvage, Krisna Uk draws on extensive research in a Cambodian village she calls Leu to provide a unique ethnography of the Jorai, an ethnic minority group that lives in Vietnam and in the most heavily bombed region of northeast Cambodia.