When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out. Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without re...

Is there an “American Empire?” A lot of people on the Left say “yes.” Actually, a lot of people on the Right say “yes” too. But Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman says “no.” In her stimulating new treatment of the history of American foreign policy American Umpir...

Arend Lijphart is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the American Political Science Association. In this interview,

Many Americans tend to think of 1776 as the year when the United States began making history on its own terms. That is simply untrue. Building on recent scholarship that challenges this assumption is Eliga Gould‘s Among the Powers of the Earth: The Ame...

Globalization is one of those words we hear on an almost daily basis. The world today is interconnected in ways that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago. It seems as if everyone knows what globalization is,

You wouldn’t know from the 2012 president race but the United States remains engaged in a fairly bloody conflict in Afghanistan. In addition to boots on the ground, we deploy scores of drones in Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa to keep Al Qaeda a...

What if genocide scholars have been approaching the field the wrong way? When I first opened Extremely Violent Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I was immediately struck by the immense depth of research and learning...

Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-off have moral obligations to those who are impoverishe...

Clifford Bob is the author of the new book The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge University Press 2012). Bob is an associate professor of political science at Duquesne University.

Minkah Makalani is the author of a new intellectual history on the efforts of early twentieth century black radicals to organize an international movement, one that would address both racial and class oppression around the globe.

The 2012 London Olympics are here.  To mark the event, New Books in Sports offers another of its occasional seminar episodes.  And as with any great seminar, you’ll be eager to tell people what you’ve learned.

Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of the Women’s Champions League.

Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the la...

There are a lot of balls in my house. Baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, basketballs, volleyballs. We have Wiffle balls, Nerf balls, and Super Balls. My children and I occasionally use the balls for their intended purposes.

It is not uncommon for many Americans to believe that morality and order comes from God and religion. A society without these elements would consequently be immoral and chaotic. When Phil Zuckerman traveled to Scandinavia, however,

It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Marshall Poe does just that.

It’s the English Premier League’s birthday! On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to create a new, breakaway league.

Today, you can open your newspaper and find stories about mass rape in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, death sentences for adulterous women in Iran, or Central American women smuggled into the US for the purposes of sexual slavery.

“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.” Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For them, the world is bounded by the Big Ten and the North...

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion.

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks.

One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics,

One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities,

When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single,

International theorists like to game out every possible scenario. What would happen if you applied their methodology to dealing with the fictional public policy challenge of a zombie infestation? In Dan Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and ...