Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk,

“The public don’t understand jazz music as we musicians do. A diminished seventh don’t mean a thing to them, but they go for high notes. After all, the public is paying. If musicians depended on musicians at the box office they would starve to death.

Michael J. Kramer, author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the way rock music became a venue, a medium,

Hitler famously said about the Armenian genocide “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” For much of the last 75 years, few people did in fact speak of it.  When they did, the discussion largely revolved around the question...

A common philosophical picture of language proposes to begin with the various kinds of communicative acts individuals perform by means of language.  This view has it that communication proceeds largely by way of interpretation,

Vanessa Williamson is coauthor (with Theda Skocpol) of The Tea Party: Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), a New Yorker magazine “Ten Best Political Books of 2012”). Williamson is a Ph.D.

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States and beyond.

The Cold War was experienced by millions around the world. For many, Soviets were the enemies, and nuclear war the threat. For millions more, however, the Cold War enemies and threats were different. In Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s ...

James A. Milward‘s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers.The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxford “A Very Short Introduction” series.

Propositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences; they are the objects of belief,

Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.

In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn,

When confronted with a law that they find morally unconscionable, citizens sometimes engage in civil disobedience – they publicly break the law with a view to communicating their judgment that it is unjust.

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tuni...

Every hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the economy in the near term more than any court case ever had.

Eric Hayot‘s new book is a bold, ambitious, and inspiring call for revising the way we think about, practice, and teach literary history. Pt. I of On Literary Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2012) offers a critical evaluation of the notion of “worlds”...

Pragmatism is American’s home-grown philosophy, but it is not widely understood. This partly is due to the fact that pragmatism emerged out of deep philosophical disputes among its earliest proponents: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James,

Sarah Reckhow is the author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics (Oxford University Press 2013). Reckhow is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.

Feed: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Comic: “Practice!” When I first began to build a jazz record library back in the early 1960s, one particular album stood out. A rare “double-album,” Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert was more ...

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explain...

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles the question of such ‘cyclical’ changes.

The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics.

The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion nationwide. Indeed, 40 years ago today, women and men around the country were talking about the decision which they had heard on the news ear...