Category: History

November 7, 2019

Book Excerpt! Amboina.1623, by Adam Clulow (introduction)

“A true model of globally minded historical scholarship, Clulow’s brilliant new study combines insights derived from his cutting-edge work in the digital humanities with the best traditions of archival research and interpretation. Carefully exploring the Asian context in which the...

November 6, 2019

Why Waterboarding Won’t Die

“In a gripping story about fear and loathing in Amboina, Adam Clulow probes a pivotal event in world history to offer fresh insights about the entanglements of European empires in Asia. Meticulously researched and engagingly told, Amboina, 1623 is that...

October 25, 2019

Cameron Vanderscoff on Robert Rauschenberg in India

“Fall in love with Robert Rauschenberg, galactic master of art and life, through his worldwide collaborations.” ~Dorothy Lichtenstein, president of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation To close our week long celebration of Robert Rauschenberg, oral historian Cameron Vanderscoff brings Rauschenberg’s 1975...

October 23, 2019

Q&A: Sara Sinclair on Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History

“Fall in love with Robert Rauschenberg, galactic master of art and life, through his worldwide collaborations.” ~ Dorothy Lichtenstein, president of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation In today’s Q&A, the editor and lead interviewer for Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History, Sara Sinclair, describes...

October 22, 2019

Make Your Acquaintance with Robert Rauschenberg!

“Fall in love with Robert Rauschenberg, galactic master of art and life, through his worldwide collaborations.” ~ Dorothy Lichtenstein, president of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Today we are wishing Robert Rauschenberg—one of America’s most influential artists— a happy birthday. Rauschenberg is...

October 17, 2019

Book Excerpt! Modern Things on Trial (prologue)

“By tracing the evolution of ‘laissez-faire Salafism’ in response to consumer concerns about the religious status of new commodities and technologies, Halevi positions Islam’s modern reformation as driven more by materialist than ideational forces. This is a highly original rethinking of...

October 2, 2019

Q&A: Ulbe Bosma on The Making of a Periphery

“The incorporation of Island Southeast Asia into the global capitalist economy was not one homogenizing process, as scholars from Immanuel Wallerstein to Daron Acemoğlu would have it. Instead, local demographic, social, and political conditions determined the emergence of a variety...

September 30, 2019

Reading List: Books About WWII and Its Aftermath in Translation

It’s International Translation Day and we’re celebrating with a list of recommended reading that is sure to delight World War II buffs and aficionados. Bringing lesser known aspects of the time period to light, this compilation of books in translation...

September 19, 2019

Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai on Lust, Commerce, and Corruption

“What better way to explore the riches of Japanese society before its “opening” to the West than through this masterful translation of one of the most colorful social commentaries of the time? Student and scholar alike will treasure this volume.”...

September 18, 2019

Dominique Kalifa on the Translation of Vice, Crime, and Poverty

“Dominique Kalifa is one of the best French cultural historians of his generation and a worthy successor to Alain Corbin at the Sorbonne. Vice, Crime, and Poverty examines the urban ‘underworld,’ not in the twentieth-century sense of organized crime but as an...

September 18, 2019

Thomas Hansen on Translating Ernst Jünger

“Ernst Jünger’s record of German-occupied Paris and the battlefields of the Caucasus is a treasure trove for readers interested in the history of the Second World War. Even more, though, it is a literary accomplishment of the first order, a...

August 5, 2019

Six Facts About Gun Violence in the U.S. That Everyone Should Know

“Based on years of study, Dexter Voisin has written an unusually thoughtful, sensitive, and astute meditation on violence—what it means, how it comes about, how it affects people, and how the media choose to write about it. The book’s critical...