Books published by Yale University Press

Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. It comprises more than 17,000 islands inhabited by 230 million people who speak over 300 different languages. Now the worlds largest Muslim nation, Indonesia remains extraordinarily heterogeneous due to the waves of immigrationBuddhist, Hindu, Arab, and Europeanthat have defined the regions history.Fifty years after the collapse of Dutch colonial rule, Indonesia is a nation in the midst of dramatic upheaval. In this broad survey, Jean Gelman Taylor explores the connections between the nations many communities, and the differences that propel contemporary breakaway movements.Drawing on a broad range of sources, including art, archaeology, and literature, Taylor provides a historical overview from the prehistoric period to the present day. The text is enlivened by brief capsule histories on topics ranging from pepper to Maharajas to smallpox.This ambitious bookthe first new history of Indonesia written in over twenty yearswill be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Southeast Asia and the future stability of the region.

This state-of-the-art book examines the effect of social relationships on physical health. It surveys and assesses the research that shows not only that supportive relationships protect us from a multitude of mental health problems but also that the absence of supportive relationships increases the risk of dying from various diseases.Bert N. Uchino discusses the links between social support and mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV/AIDS. He investigates whether social support is more effective for some individuals and within certain cultures. After evaluating existing conceptual models linking social support to health outcomes, he offers his own broader perspective on the issue. And he suggests the implications for intervention and for future research in this area.

One of the master stylists of American literature, Gore Vidal now provides us with his uniquely irreverent take on America's founding fathers, bringing them to life at key moments of decision in the birthing of our nation.“Pure Vidal. . . . Inventing a Nation is his edgy tribute to the way we were before the fall.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“[Vidal offers] details that enliven and . . .  reflections on the past that point sharply to today.” —Richard Eder, New York Times“An engaging [and] . . . unblinking view of our national heroes by one who cherishes them, warts and all.”—Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books“[Vidal's] quick wit flickers over the canonical tale of our republic's founding, turning it into a dark and deliciously nuanced comedy of men, manners, and ideas.”—Amanda Heller, Boston Sunday Globe“This entertaining and enlightening reappraisal of the Founders is a must for buffs of American civilization and its discontents.”—Booklist“Gore Vidal . . . still understands American history backwards and forwards as few writers ever have.”—David Kipen, National Public Radio 

From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. In this stimulating book Michael Broyles considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society itself.Broyles starts by examining the careers of three notably unconventional composers: William Billings in the eighteenth century, Anthony Philip Heinrich in the nineteenth, and Charles Ives in the twentieth. All three had unusual lives, wrote music that many considered incomprehensible, and are now recognized as key figures in the development of American music. Broyles goes on to investigate the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music—classical, popular, and jazz—and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa. The history of the maverick tradition, Broyles shows, has much to tell us about the role of music in American culture and the tension between individualism and community in the American consciousness.

The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. In this book Richard Harvey Brown asks how we can distinguish the uniquely American elements of these changes from more global influences. His answer focuses on the ways in which economic imperatives give shape to the shifting experience of being American.Drawing on a wide knowledge of American history and literature, the latest social science, and contemporary social issues, Brown investigates continuity and change in American race relations, politics, religion, conception of selfhood, families, and the arts. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary America, showing how postmodernism is perceived and felt by individuals and focusing attention on the strengths and limitations of American democracy.

Michael Walzer is one of the world’s most eminent philosophers on the subject of war and ethics. Now, for the first time since his classic Just and Unjust Wars was published almost three decades ago, this volume brings together his most provocative arguments about contemporary military conflicts and the ethical issues they raise.The essays in the book are divided into three sections. The first deals with issues such as humanitarian intervention, emergency ethics, and terrorism. The second consists of Walzer’s responses to particular wars, including the first Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And the third presents an essay in which Walzer imagines a future in which war might play a less significant part in our lives. In his introduction, Walzer reveals how his thinking has changed over time.Written during a period of intense debate over the proper use of armed force, this book gets to the heart of difficult problems and argues persuasively for a moral perspective on war.

Written by a preeminent religious historian, this book provides an introduction to early Christian thought. Focusing on major figures such as St. Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, as well as a host of less well known thinkers, Robert Wilken chronicles the emergence of a specifically Christian intellectual tradition.In chapters on topics including early Christian worship, Christian poetry and the spiritual life, the Trinity, Christ, the Bible, and icons, Wilken shows that the energy and vitality of early Christianity arose from within the life of the Church. While early Christian thinkers drew on the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of the ancient world, it was the versatile vocabulary of the Bible that loosened their tongues and minds and allowed them to construct the world anew, intellectually and spiritually. These thinkers were not seeking to invent a world of ideas, Wilken shows, but rather to win the hearts of men and women and to change their lives.Early Christian thinkers set in place a foundation that has endured. Their writings are an irreplaceable inheritance, and Wilken shows that they can still be heard as living voices within contemporary culture.