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The puppet can entertain or terrify, evoke the innocence of childhood, or become a magical entity, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. This book takes us on a meditative journey through the world of puppet theater, exploring the mysterious fascination of these unsettling objects.

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technologies began to light up streets, buildings, and public spaces. This book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period.

A major figure in American blues and folk music, Big Bill Broonzy (1903-58) left his Arkansas Delta home after World War I, headed north, and became the leading Chicago blues-man of the 1930s. This title traces Big Bill's career from his rise as a nationally prominent blues star, including his historic 1938 appearance at Carnegie Hall.

In 1849, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. Lured by the promise of riches, thousands of settlers left behind the forests, rain, and fertile soil of the eastern United States in favor of the rough-hewn lands of the American West. This title brings their perspective to life.

DNA profiling is often heralded as unassailable criminal evidence, a veritable "truth machine" that can overturn convictions based on eyewitness testimony, confessions, and other forms of forensic evidence. This book traces the controversial history of DNA fingerprinting by looking at court cases in the US and UK from the mid-1980s onwards.

What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has been obscured by historicist approaches to literature. This title encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side.

Presents a selection from over three hundred essays on genre movies, art films, animation, and the business of Hollywood that have graced Bordwell and Thompson's blog. This title offers ideas sure to set film lovers thinking - and keep them returning to the silver screen.

A meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke. It uses color to explore further dimensions of what the author calls 'the bodily unconscious' in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, it takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images.

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. This book illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough.

Explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, this title reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell.

This study looks at group dynamics in six collaborative circles: the French Impressionists; Sigmund Freud and his friends; C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings; social reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; the Fugitive poets; and writers Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford.

Argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions.

Explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. This book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling such as fiction, films, photographs, maps, mathematical models - many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science.

Everyone wants to visit New York at least once. The Big Apple is a global tourist destination with a dizzying array of attractions throughout the five boroughs. This title provides long history of tour-giving across the globe as well as the ups and downs of New York's tour guide industry in the wake of 9/11.

Records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. This title exhibits Taussig's characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, that is combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy.

After its early introduction into the English colonies in North America, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. This book demonstrates that slavery was indeed an essential part of the foundation of the nascent republic.

What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. This book argues that it also lies at the center of the social scientist's quest to interpret and explain social life. It presents a model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society.

Scholars have made urban mothers living in poverty a focus of their research for decades. Offering an analysis of how faith both motivates and at times constrains poor mothers' actions, this book reveals the ways it serves as a lens through which many view and interpret their worlds.

Drawing on interviews with parents and teens, this title offers an intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in the United States and the Netherlands negotiate love, lust, and growing up. It provides a probing analysis of the way family culture shapes not just sex but also alcohol consumption and parent-teen relationships.

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. This title investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan.

For more than a century Friedrich Nietzsche has been a hugely popular - and surprisingly influential - figure in American high and popular culture alike. This title delves into Nietzsche's thought, and America's reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal.

Enlightenment inquiries into weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions. This title reveals how a sense of the national climate emerged in the 18th century from the systematic recording of the weather, and how it was deployed in discussions of the health and welfare of the population.

From the Model T to the SUV, this title reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new - in fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century, ever since the automobile was invented.

In 2007 a disputed election in Kenya erupted into a political crisis that led to thousands of deaths. Much of the violence fell along ethnic lines, the principal perpetrators of which were the Kalenjin. Uncovering the Kalenjin's roots, the author examines the ways in which ethnic groups are socially constructed and renegotiated over time.

Drawing on fieldwork at First Place, a popular Christian weight-loss program, and Exodus International, a network of ex-gay ministries, this title explores why some Christians feel that being fat or gay offends God, what exactly they do to lose weight or go straight, and how they make sense of the program's results - or, frequently, their lack.

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental - the product of an emerging middle class. This title uncovers a strain of cruelty coursing through the period that reminds us just how slowly ordinary sufferings became worthy of sympathy. It expands our understanding of many of the century's major authors.

At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries placed the rest in children's homes elsewhere in Greece. This book presents a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs.

Focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.

The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive this day. This title offers a portrait of several Sacred Harp groups and an insightful exploration of how they manage to maintain a sense of community.

In the early years of aviation, there was an intense dispute between British and German experts over the question of why and how an aircraft wing provides lift. This title reveals the impact that the divergent mathematical traditions of Cambridge and Gottingen had on this debate.