This book offers a historical analysis of one of the most striking and dramatic transformations to take place in Brazil and the United States during the twentieth century—the redefinition of the ...

Film and television create worlds, but they are also of a world, a world that is made up of stuff, to which humans attach meaning. Think of the last time you watched a movie: the chair you sat in, the ...

Timothy O. Benedict is Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ...

In the spring of 1931, a most unlikely figure could be seen in the new Luncheon Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange. By all accounts, he went about his business with as much alacrity and stamina ...

Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our ...

Can philanthropy alleviate inequality? Do antipoverty programs work on the ground? In this eye-opening analysis, Erica Kohl-Arenas bores deeply into how these issues play out in California’s Central ...

I was born in January 1922 in Batang, a remote and beautiful village in Kham (Eastern Tibet) roughly five hundred miles from Lhasa and twelve hundred miles from Beijing. Batang is located in a valley ...

Just before I turned twelve, my family drove to Oregon to outrun the spring. Every time it looked like we were going to stay in one town, the weather would warm up and my father would pluck us out of ...

Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, ...

For a city as politically fascinating and world renowned as San Francisco, it is surprising how little exists in the way of book-length scholarly literature focused solely on the city's recent history ...

Back in print for the first time in over ten years, this classic account of the numerous struggles—national, state, and local—that have occurred over western American water rights since the late 1800s ...

Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg ...