Cornell University Press: 1150 books
Sodom on the Thames
Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times
Language: English
Release Date: February 2, 2012
Sodom on the Thames looks closely at three episodes involving sex between men in late-nineteenth-century England. Morris Kaplan draws on extensive research into court records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal correspondence and diaries, even a pornographic novel. He focuses on two notorious...
Whose Detroit?
Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2015
America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. In Whose Detroit?, Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the...
Final Solutions
Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2013
Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group...
by Marcus Tullius Cicero
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2014
Cicero’s On the Republic and On the Laws are his major works of political philosophy. They offer his fullest treatment of fundamental political questions: Why should educated people have any concern for politics? Is the best form of government simple, or is it a combination of elements from such...
Damned Women
Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
Language: English
Release Date: January 18, 1999
In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft...
The Ideology of the Offensive
Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2013
Jack Snyder's analysis of the attitudes of military planners in the years prior to the Great War offers new insight into the tragic miscalculations of that era and into their possible parallels in present-day war planning. By 1914, the European military powers had adopted offensive military strategies...
MacArthur in Asia
The General and His Staff in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
"Hiroshi Masuda reinterprets MacArthur by going back to his years in the Philippines. In particular, [the book] focuses on the ‘Bataan Boys,’ the group of subordinates who accompanied MacArthur in his 1942 evacuation from the Philippines, and their views of MacArthur. MacArthur in Asia offers...
Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers
Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917–1945
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
The U.S. Army entered World War II unprepared. In addition, lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's...
"That the People Might Live"
Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
The word "elegy" comes from the Ancient Greek elogos, meaning a mournful poem or song, in particular, a song of grief in response to loss. Because mourning and memorialization are so deeply embedded in the human condition, all human societies have developed means for lamenting the dead, and, in "That...
On Roman Religion
Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2016
Was religious practice in ancient Rome cultic and hostile to individual expression? Or was there, rather, considerable latitude for individual initiative and creativity? Jörg Rüpke, one of the world’s leading authorities on Roman religion, demonstrates in his new book that it was a lived religion...
The Making of Southeast Asia
international relations of a region
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Developing a framework to study "what makes a region," Amitav Acharya investigates the origins and evolution of Southeast Asian regionalism and international relations. He views the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) "from the bottom up" as not only a U.S.-inspired ally in the Cold War...
Eyewitness to a Genocide
The United Nations and Rwanda
Language: English
Release Date: May 3, 2012
Why was the UN a bystander during the Rwandan genocide? Do its sins of omission leave it morally responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead? Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1993 to 1994, covered Rwanda for much of the genocide. Based on his first-hand...
Blue Helmets and Black Markets
The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
The 1992–1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the...
Modern Hatreds
The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2015
Ethnic conflict has been the driving force of wars all over the world, yet it remains an enigma. What is it about ethnicity that breaks countries apart and drives people to acts of savage violence against their lifelong neighbors?
Stuart Kaufman rejects the notion of permanent "ancient hatreds"...