First published in 1960, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History represents an analysis of the decline of moral and political standards in the 20th century in light of their development during the 17th and 18th centuries. Professor Alfred Cobban not only provides a thorough and comprehensible overview of the political ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers, but also illustrates how these ideas are relevant for our own age....

The author examines the varying intellectual reconciliations of the ideas of freedom, progress, and slavery that Southerners held in the pre-Civil War era.

The years after World War I saw a different sort of war in the American South, as Modernism began to contest the "New South Creed" for the allegiance of Southern intellectuals. In The War Within, Daniel Joseph Singal examines the struggle between the characteristic culture of twentieth-century America and the South's tenacious blend of Victorianism and the Cavalier myth. He explores the lives and works of historians Ulrich B. Phillips and Broadus...

"Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism"-- Provided by publisher.

Hailed for her “fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia” (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and...

Is NYPD Blue a less valid form of artistic expression than a Shakespearean drama? Who is to judge and by what standards?In this new edition of Herbert Gans's brilliantly conceived and clearly argued landmark work, he builds on his critique of the universality of high cultural standards. While conceding that popular and high culture have converged to some extent over the twenty-five years since he wrote the book, Gans holds that the choices of typical...

"Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cutural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone...

In 1979 Elizabeth Eisenstein provided the first full-scale treatment of the fifteenth-century printing revolution in the West in her monumental two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. This abridged edition, after summarising the initial changes introduced by the establishment of printing shops, goes on to discuss how printing challenged traditional institutions and affected three major cultural movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation,...

First published in 1928, Aldous Huxley's "Point Counter Point" draws its name from the back and forth exchange that occurs during a debate. In a similar way Huxley presents a series of interconnected storylines centered on the various characters of the novel. There is Walter Bidlake, a young journalist who is caught between two love interests. Walter's father, John, is a famous painter whose skill and health is in decline. John's daughter, Elinor,...