A journey through Europe’s old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent’s fraught history “[A] fascinating chronicle.”—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. These old towns and their turbulent histories have been key sites in Europe’s ongoing theater of politics and war. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, the acclaimed writer Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history. Uncovering hidden stories behind these old and old-seeming façades, Kohn offers us a new understanding of the politics of European history-making—showing how our visits to old towns could promote belonging over exclusion, and empathy over indifference.
The revolutionary roots of the artists collective known as the Impressionists—and the course they charted for modern art
A career-spanning examination of the work of Robert Bergman and its place within the history of American art
An exploration of contemporary African masquerade that reveals its cultural contexts, artistic innovations, and intersection with museum collection practices
An examination of how engagement with the nuances of Caribbean intellectual thought could reshape art history
The first full-scale history of Theoderic and the Goths in more than seventy-five years, tracing the transformation of a divided kingdom into a great power
A lavish exploration of how contemporary jewelry pushes the boundary between ornament and art
A celebration of printmaker LaToya M. Hobbs featuring a suite of life-size woodcut prints
From beloved Japanese author Shūsaku Endō, a newly discovered novella and five short stories of love, grief, and maternal longing
An exploration of the rich history of printmaking at Cleveland’s Karamu House, a center of Black arts, culture, and community since 1915
A revelatory new approach to understanding fashion in America that focuses on the stories told by worn, imperfect, and ordinary clothes
An exploration of how the biblical heroine Queen Esther, a symbol of resilience and a figure of immense popularity, was portrayed in seventeenth-century Dutch art
James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit
Examining the Italian artist’s career-long exploration of the human figure, this book offers new perspectives on the history of postwar and contemporary art
A call to reenvision and de-Westernize French studies and media studies through transmedial examinations of Senegalese cultural production, media practices, and art forms
A novel of art, desire, and time lost and regained, by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano
Drawing on the riches of the Western tradition, Anthony T. Kronman defends a humane conservativism for our enlightened age
How colonial conquest was driven by state-sponsored, profit-driven campaigns of corporeal mutilation of Indian peoples in the Americas
A psychoanalyst’s sensitive exploration of schizophrenia through the stories and words of three women patients
A groundbreaking study of textiles as transcultural objects in the Qing court that provides a new understanding of the interconnectedness of the early modern world
A fascinating and moving history of the British and German war dead buried on enemy soil in the two world wars
A sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South, detailing the racial and economic inequities of rape law and the resistance of ordinary women
An unprecedented examination of the underexplored late work of the iconic American modernist
Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire
How the U.S. policy of competition with China is detrimental to democracy, peace, and prosperity—and how a saner approach is possible
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