These portable guides incorporate historical facts with an intriguing narrative, helping to show the reader how each city (or state) got its start. From their humble beginnings to the powerhouses they've become, each of the cities in this series has its o

In a rich and engaging book that illuminates the lives and attitudes of peasants in preindustrial Europe, Piero Camporesi makes the unexpected and fascinating claim that these people lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their ver

"Classical works have for us become covered with the glassy armor of familiarity," wrote Victor Shklovsky in 1914. Here Kristin Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's Ivan

This classic reference of definitions, anedotes, slang, allusions, proverbs, and much hard-to-find information on the arts, literature, science, and popular culture has been completely revised and updated to reflect the present state of our language. Feat