An engaging collection about everything from the abacus to zoology in Japan, designed to preserve knowledge about a society that was modernizing beyond recognition. This book remains an erudite source of information about culture, history, art, religion,

This long-awaited work explores the place of kokugaku (rendered here as "nativism") during Japan's Tokugawa period. Kokugaku, the sense of a distinct and sacred Japanese identity, appeared in the eighteenth century in reaction to the pervasive influence o

In this book, the distinguished historian Carl Schorske--author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siècle Vienna--draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellect

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his i

A story of the short lived Armenian occupation of Cilicia.

An ambitious, perceptive portrayal of a complex man, this best-selling biography broke new ground in its exploration of Jefferson's inner life.Here for the first time we meet Jefferson as a man of feeling and passion. With a novelist's skill and meticulou