"The Cold War still casts a long shadow over contemporary American society. It was a transformative era that continues to condition Americans' national anxieties, popular culture, consumer habits, and identity. The essays in "Red Reckoning" take an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to examine how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century impacted American society. While historians and political scientists have explored Cold War...

"In this remarkable and enlivening study, Stefanos Geroulanos traces the development of our modern fascination with humanity's deep past, and lays out that fascination's deadly costs." --Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity--and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence...

"A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series. Some cities are like stars. When the conditions are right, they ignite, and burn with such fierce intensity that they outshine every other city on the planet. Vienna was one such city and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the birthplace of the modern mind...

"The 1970's are frequently seen as a watershed period, an era from which sources of 21st-century American culture began to flow. But the 1970's are also seen as a particularly backward-looking time, seen by many critics as morbidly nostalgic for times before the wrenching changes that were associated with the 1960's. Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America explores the relationship of the 1970's American culture to the pre-Sixties...

"An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today's world, creating both opportunity and peril--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth. The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger...

American breakdown dissects how, in the space of a generation, the pillars that sustained the once-dominant superpower have been dangerously eroded. From government to business, from media to medicine--the strength and security of the American experiment have been weakened by a widening gap between the elites who control these institutions and the public. At the root of this breakdown is a precipitous fall in Americans' trust in their political, business...

"The true story of the first time machines came for human jobs--and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today"--Dust jacket flap. "The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized...

"Explore the medieval world through its art with this hilarious guide to the medieval world that will have you laughing out loud. Live, laugh love and die in the Middle Ages with Weird Medieval Guys! Explore what your medieval life would have been through a choose-your-own-adventure full of quizzes, how-to guides, diagrams and flow charts that takes you from your birth to your gruesome end, revealing your patron saint, the fate of your love life and...

"This is the first comprehensive, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire (or Byzantium) to appear in over a generation. It begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and ends with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, covering political and military history as well as all major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy. In recent decades, the study of Byzantium has been revolutionized...

"Long before hygge, lagom, or ikigai took the world by storm, there was la dolce vita -- the Italian phrase for "the sweet life." La dolce vita encourages the benefits of practicing Italian traditions on improving your mental health by taking life slow and relishing in the sweet moments. This unique self-help approach offers practical advice on forming habits, love, balance, and simplicity that make daily life in Italy a celebration"--