History - Social History

"A cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves." ―John Vernon, Los Angeles Times Book Review Lucy Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the...

"A magisterial new history."--The New York Times "Endlessly fascinating."--Slate A groundbreaking history of sexual emotion, sexual activity, gender relations, marriage and the family--and how Christianity has interacted with this panorama of human concerns Few matters produce more public interest and public anxiety than sex...

The untold story of the many people behind one of America's most iconic photographs. Lunch on a Beam, also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, shows ironworkers eating lunch on a steel beam during the construction of Rockefeller Center's RCA Building in 1932. It's...

Discover a feminist pop history that looks beyond the Ton and Jane Austen to highlight the Regency women who succeeded on their own terms and were largely lost to history--until now. "Romance novel readers, Austenites, and Byronheads will love delving into the truth behind...

Science and religion have always been at each other's throats, right? Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today. 'A deeply researched history of the...

How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture. Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans...

A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers. How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were...

Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldn't get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian...

An expansive and accessible account of anarchism as a theory of practice. Means and Ends is a new overview of the revolutionary strategy of anarchism in Europe and the United States between 1868 and 1939. Zoe Baker clearly and accessibly explains the ideas that...

Most histories of medicine center doctors: the standard-bearers of expertise and innovation. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have, and always have had, on medicine and public health.Throughout early American history, everyday people--from enslaved individuals to village midwives to cowboys--have been...

The essential introduction to the Middle Ages by the bestselling author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward and unchanging time characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. By contrast we believe...

A macabre, spectacular, and thought-provoking survey of death in life, this book collects the many ways human remains are used in decorative, commemorative, and devotional contexts around the world today.This compact edition of Memento Mori takes the reader on a ghoulish but beautiful tour...

A whip-smart and entertaining work of narrative history that shows how an unlikely partnership borne of necessity spawned a lucrative marijuana industry that changed the world California's homegrown weed industry helped launch the solar power industry, and that's not all. Mendocino county--or Mendo--sits within...

Responding to shifts in the political and economic experiences of Mexicans in America, this newly revised and expanded edition of Mexicanos provides a relevant and contemporary consideration of this vibrant community. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact...

Winner of the Florida Book Award, Gold Medal for Nonfiction "A tall but telescopic-sight-true tale of Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and a large cavorting cast running around with sand in their shoes at 'ground zero for lust and greed and most of...

An unflinching look at the all but forgotten though no less shocking 1979 racial tragedy that divided Greensboro, N.C., and the nation, and the grassroots activists who, in their tireless fight for justice, refused to give up on America's promised ideals.On November 3, 1979,...

"A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched" (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions. Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who...

"Muskism cuts straight to the core of the man and the moment, explaining how a mercurial, conspiracy-prone, vicious bastard can inspire loyalty and billions in other peoples' money, and the nightmare world he wants to build with those billions." -Cory Doctorow, author of EnshittificationA...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE'S TEN FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Harper's Bazaar - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Publishers Weekly Gloria Steinem--writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leader--now tells a...

George R. Stewart's classic study of place-naming in the United States was written during World War II as a tribute to the varied heritage of the nation's peoples. More than half a century later, Names on the Land remains the authoritative source on its...