Books published by Cornell University Press

Mitrovich argues that the Cold War policy of containment was only the first step in America's clandestine campaign to destroy Soviet power, revealing a range of previously unknown covert actions launched during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? U.S...

Several hundred thousand members of the Red Army were stationed in East Germany when that state was reunited with its western counterpart. The peaceful transfer of these soldiers to their homeland produced a welcome outcome to a potentially explosive...

In his recent book Against Liberalism, philosopher John Kekes argued that liberalism as a political system is doomed to failure by its internal inconsistencies. In this companion volume, he makes a compelling case for conservatism as the best...

With the publication of Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, widely considered a classic in Modern Greek studies and in collateral fields, Margaret Alexiou established herself as a major intellectual innovator on the interconnections among ancient...

"Jerrold Levinson's new book, Music in the Moment, makes a major contribution to the now flourishing field of philosophy of music. He has a daring thesis about music listening that is going to shake up the experts, and pose for them, and for us all...

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race...

Covering the history of Renaissance Florence from the fourteenth century to the beginnings of the Medici duchy, Trexler traces collective ritual behavior in all its forms.

For the specialist in the study of narrative structure, this is a solid and very perceptive exploration of the issues salient to the telling of a story-whatever the medium.

Beginning with Aristotle and the Greeks and ending with semiotics and post-structuralism, Theories of the Theatre is the first comprehensive survey of Western dramatic theory. In this expanded edition the author has updated the book and added a new...

While recounting how past generations have personified evil, Jeffrey Burton Russell deepens our understanding of the ways in which people have dealt with the enduring problem of radical evil.

Mephistopheles is the fourth and final volume of Jeffrey Burton Russell's critically acclaimed history of the concept of the Devil, continuing in this volume the story from the Reformation to the present.

Youens addresses the different aspects of the Winterreise: its cultural milieu, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

Combining a sensitivity to historical detail with a judicious search for general patterns, Empires will engage the attention of social scientists in many disciplines.

The atlas of contemporary capitalism is curious indeed. A desperately poor and civil-war-wracked nation, Liberia, is the world's shipping superpower; the Cayman Islands the fifth-largest financial center in the world; land-locked Zurich a venerable...

Katzenstein maintains that democratic corporatism is an effective way of coping with a rapidly changing world-a more effective way than the United States and several other large industrial countries have yet managed to discover.

Barry R. Posen explores how military doctrine takes shape and the role it plays in grand strategy-that collection of military, economic, and political means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security.

"Michael Kazin enables us to begin to understand the way in which populism has changed from a politics of the left to a politics of the right. The important questions raised by the success of the populist right in the United States are illuminated in...

The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves...

Drawing on the unfamiliar genre of the death liturgy, he arrives at a remarkably comprehensive view of the religion of death in ancient Egypt.

Michael Urban chronicles the advent of blues music in Russia and explores the significance of the genre in the turbulent, postcommunist society. Russians, he explains, have taken a music originating in the "low" culture of the American South and...

In the last thirty years, work in analytic philosophy of art has flourished, and it has given rise to considerably controversy. Stephen Davies describes and analyzes the definition of art as it has been discussed in Anglo-American philosophy during...

In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual...

In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores...

Liberalism is doomed to failure, John Kekes argues in this penetrating criticism of its basic assumptions. Liberals favor individual autonomy, a wide plurality of choices, and equal rights and resources, seeing them as essential for good lives. They oppose such evils as selfishness, intolerance, cruelty, and greed. Yet the more autonomy...

In a dark departure from our standard picture of whistleblowers, C. Fred Alford offers a chilling account of the world of people who have come forward to protest organizational malfeasance in government agencies and in the private sector. The...