Cornell University Press imprint: 972 books
Novels, Readers, and Reviewers
Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
This book describes and characterizes responses of American readers to fiction in the generation before the Civil War. It is based on close examination of the reviews of all novels—both American and European—that appeared in major American periodicals during the years 1840–1860, a period in...
Japan Prepares for Total War
The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2013
The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Historian Michael Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security. Drawing on...
Sorry States
Apologies in International Politics
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Governments increasingly offer or demand apologies for past human rights abuses, and it is widely believed that such expressions of contrition are necessary to promote reconciliation between former adversaries. The post-World War II experiences of Japan and Germany suggest that international apologies...
Promiscuous Media
Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926-1945
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2018
In Promiscuous Media, Hikari Hori makes a compelling case that the visual culture of Showa-era Japan articulated urgent issues of modernity rather than serving as a simple expression of nationalism. Hori makes clear that the Japanese cinema of the time was in fact almost wholly built on a foundation...
Samurai to Soldier
Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Language: English
Release Date: July 9, 2016
In Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan’s principal arms-bearers. The most common version of...
The End of Satisfaction
Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2014
In The End of Satisfaction, Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term’s significance as an organizing principle of Christian repentance, she examines the ways...
by Jan Assmann
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2011
"Human beings," the acclaimed Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes, "are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge." In his new book, Assmann explores images of death and of death rites...
Objects of War
The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2018
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central...
Between Homeland and Motherland
Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In Between Homeland and Motherland, Alvin B. Tillery Jr. considers the history of political engagement with Africa on the part of African Americans, beginning with the birth of Paul Cuffe’s back-to-Africa movement in the Federal Period to the Congressional Black Caucus’ struggle to reach consensus...
Absolute Destruction
Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as...
Idols in the East
European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2012
Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East,...
Making Good Neighbors
Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2014
In the 1950s and 1960s, as the white residents, real estate agents, and municipal officials of many American cities fought to keep African Americans out of traditionally white neighborhoods, Philadelphia's West Mount Airy became one of the first neighborhoods in the nation where residents came together...
The Familiar Made Strange
American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2015
In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational...
The Captive and the Gift
Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
The Caucasus region of Eurasia, wedged in between the Black and Caspian Seas, encompasses the modern territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, as well as the troubled republic of Chechnya in southern Russia. A site of invasion, conquest, and resistance since the onset of historical record,...