Cornell University Press imprint: 972 books
Our Frontier Is the World
The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2018
Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier Is the World is a provocative account of how the Boy Scouts echoed and enabled American global expansion in the twentieth century.
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has long been a standard bearer for national identity. The core values of the organization have,...
by William P. Alston
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that William P. Alston, one of America's most distinguished and prolific analytic philosophers, addresses in this major contribution to the philosophy of language. His answer focuses on the given sentence's potential to play...
Scribes of Space
Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2019
Scribes of Space posits that the conception of space—the everyday physical areas we perceive and through which we move—underwent critical transformations between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Matthew Boyd Goldie examines how natural philosophers, theologians, poets, and other thinkers...
Order at the Bazaar
Power and Trade in Central Asia
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2017
Order at the Bazaar delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region—they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are...
Sex, Love, and Migration
Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
Sex, Love, and Migration goes beyond a common narrative of women's exploitation as a feature of migration in the early twenty-first century, a story that features young women from poor countries who cross borders to work in low paid and often intimate labor. Alexia Bloch argues that the mobility of...
Speaking of Slavery
Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2018
In this highly original work, Steven A. Epstein shows that the ways Italians employ words and think about race and labor are profoundly affected by the language used in medieval Italy to sustain a system of slavery. The author's findings about the surprising persistence of the "language of slavery"...
Raja Yudhisthira
Kingship in Epic Mahabharata
Language: English
Release Date: May 16, 2017
In Raja Yudhisthira, Kevin McGrath brings his comprehensive literary, ethnographic, and analytical knowledge of the epic Mahabharata to bear on the representation of kingship in the poem. He shows how the preliterate Great Bharata song depicts both archaic and classical models of kingly and premonetary...
More Than Words
Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2018
Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing,...
To Shape Our World for Good
Master Narratives and Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1900–2011
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2019
Why does the United States pursue robust military invasions to change some foreign regimes but not others? Conventional accounts focus on geopolitics or elite ideology. C. William Walldorf, Jr., argues that the politics surrounding two broad, public narratives—the liberal narrative and the restraint...
Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia
Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2014
In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire’s Middle Volga region (today’s Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier’s mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples. The immediate...
Where Three Worlds Met
Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean
Language: English
Release Date: June 20, 2017
Sicily is a lush and culturally rich island at the center of the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout its history, the island has been conquered and colonized by successive waves of peoples from across the Mediterranean region. In the early and central Middle Ages, the island was ruled and occupied in turn...
State-Building
Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2014
Francis Fukuyama famously predicted "the end of history" with the ascendancy of liberal democracy and global capitalism. The topic of his latest book is, therefore, surprising: the building of new nation-states.The end of history was never an automatic procedure, Fukuyama argues, and the well-governed...
Empire of Hope
The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2018
Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical...
Good Governance Gone Bad
How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2018
If we believe that the small, open economies of Nordic Europe are paragons of good governance, why are they so prone to economic crisis? In Good Governance Gone Bad, Darius Ornston provides evidence that adapting flexibly to rapid, technological change and shifting patterns of economic competition...