A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestock‘s new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford University Press,

It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about your mother’s new hairdo, and phenomenal states,

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World,

Popular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very humanity; most frequently,

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for th...

The founding fathers–and mothers, sons and daughters–were British. Sort of. It’s true that they were subjects of the British crown, and that they looked, talked, acted and had the tastes of folks in London. But they were always different.

When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regim...

In a liberal democratic society, individuals share political power as equals. Consequently, liberal democratic governments must recognize each citizen as a political equal. This requires, in part, that liberal democratic governments must seek to govern...

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global econom...

Great Britain and Russia faced off across the Pamirs for much of the nineteenth century; their rivalries and animosities often obscuring underlying commonalities; these were, after all, colonial Empires governing ‘alien’ peoples,

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case,

Europe may currently be in crisis and riven with divisions, but at least it’s a Europe of independent states. It was not always so. The Soviets dominated Eastern Europe for nearly half a century following the defeat of the Nazis.

There is a lot of ritual involved in Buddhist practice. As more and more North Americans are discovering Buddhism, they are engaging in more and more Buddhist ritual, despite a general aversion many North Americans have to ritualized behavior. Dr.

The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece through to the late Roman and early Byzantine empires–David Potter’s lively narrative shows how sport,

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now ...

Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array...

A book called Southeast Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2009) might seem on the face of it to be out of place on a blog about South Asia. But as Craig Lockard so convincingly demonstrates, this region was shaped by,

Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008).

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal...

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty,

In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States.

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality amo...

Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but it’s very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In his book The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2011),

For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origina...

I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world.