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Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television progr...

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Enlightenment botany was replete with sexual symbolism -- to the extent that many botanical textbooks were widely considered pornographic. Carl Linnaeus's controversial new system for classifying plants based on their sexual characteristics, as well as his use of language resonating with erotic allusions, provoked intense public debate over the morality of botanical study. And the renowned Tahitian exploits of Joseph Banks -- whose trousers we...

How do we explain the fact that certain ideas, at certain moments in time, can have earthshaking effects? Or that some cultures have left an indelible mark while others have not? Why did Jesus, rather than Mani the Mesopotamian or the Eastern god Mithra, take hold among masses of people? Why did Karl Marx instead of Pierre Proudhon or Auguste Comte leave his mark on the century? Behind these questions lies the matter of the human need to conse...

How is it possible that Earth's atmospheric temperature has remained perfectly suited to supporting life for billions of years? Why do oxygen levels in the atmosphere remain relatively stable when only a minuscule increase would cause everything on Earth to spontaneously combust? Why are the oceans salty, but not salty enough to make them uninhabitable? In the 1960s, an English scientist names James Lovelock formulated a groundbreaking and hig...

The role of the visual is essential to Hindu tradition and culture, but many attempts to understand India's divine images have been laden with misperceptions. Darsan, a Sanskrit word that means "seeing, " is an aid to our vision, a book of ideas to help us read, think, and look at Hindu images with appreciation and imagination.

When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventional wisdom held that Jews were uniformly liberal. This book explodes the myth of a monolithic liberal Judaism. Michael Staub tells the story of the many fierce battles that raged in postwar America over what the authentically Jewish position ought to be on issues ranging from desegregation to Zionism, from Vietnam to gender relations, sexuality, a...

Yugoslavia and its history are often in the news yet poorly understood. Traversing the politics, economics, demography, and culture of the former Yugoslavia, John B. Allcock examines and makes sense of the region's troubled past and troubling present. Though many think of the Balkans as a uniquely troubled region, the author asserts that the continuities in Balkan history constitute the same processes of development that have occurred in other...

We know where he went, what he wrote, and even what he wore, but what in the world did Christopher Columbus eat? The Renaissance and the age of discovery introduced Europeans to exotic cultures, mores, manners, and ideas. Along with the cross-cultural exchange of Old and New World, East and West, came new foodstuffs, preparations, and flavors. That kitchen revolution led to the development of new utensils and table manners. Some of the impact ...

The first translation ever to appear in English that includes one of the major Chinese philosophical commentaries, the Columbia "I Ching" presents the classic book of changes for the world today. Richard Lynn's introduction to this new translation explains the organization of "The Classic of Changes" through the history of its various parts, and describes how the text was and still is used as a manual of divination with both the stalk and coin...

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers endure in the American imagination. The charm and grace of their dancing in the ten films they made together, including Top Hat and Swing Time, elicit nostalgia today. Most books about the Astaire-Rogers films focus exclusively on the music and dance scenes, but this book shows that the films are much more than the sum of those scenes, which after all only account for approximately one-third of their films' runni...