Johns Hopkins University Press: 958 books
User Unfriendly
Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2011
We’ve all been there. Seduced by the sleek designs and smart capabilities of the newest gadgets, we end up stumped by their complicated set-up instructions and exasperating error messages. In this fascinating history, Joseph J. Corn maps two centuries of consumer frustration and struggle with personal...
All Joking Aside
American Humor and Its Discontents
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2014
In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, "charged humor," and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society...
The New Middle Kingdom
China and the Early American Romance of Free Trade
Language: English
Release Date: April 25, 2017
In the imaginations of early Americans, the Middle Kingdom was the wealthiest empire in the world. Its geographical distance did not deter commercial aspirations—rather, it inspired them. Starting in the late eighteenth century, merchants from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Salem, Newport, and...
Understanding Topology
A Practical Introduction
Language: English
Release Date: January 30, 2018
Topology—the branch of mathematics that studies the properties of spaces that remain unaffected by stretching and other distortions—can present significant challenges for undergraduate students of mathematics and the sciences. Understanding Topology aims to change that.
The perfect introductory...
Comparison
Theories, Approaches, Uses
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2013
Writing and teaching across cultures and disciplines makes the act of comparison inevitable. Comparative theory and methods of comparative literature and cultural anthropology have permeated the humanities as they engage more centrally with the cultural flows and circulation of past and present globalization....
Switching Sides
How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2018
For most historians living through the fascist and communist tyrannies that culminated in World War II and the Cold War, the Salem witch trials signified the threat to truth and individual integrity posed by mass ideological movements. Work on the trials produced in this era, including Arthur Miller’s...
by Brian Swann
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2013
There is a clearing by a certain stone
where images flow and are worth stopping for.
I have stayed there almost all day in silence
until night remembered what belonged to it
and its shadows started to take back its own.
I’ve found it hard to walk away as starlight
infused daisies and the stone itself...
The Thebaid
Seven against Thebes
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2007
A classical epic of fratricide and war, the Thebaid retells the legendary conflict between the sons of Oedipus—Polynices and Eteocles—for control of the city of Thebes. The Latin poet Statius reworks a familiar story from Greek myth, dramatized long before by Aeschylus in his tragedy Seven against...
by Erwin Cook
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2004
A rich source for students of Greek mythology and literature, the Homeric hymns are also fine poetry. Attributed by the ancients to Homer, these prooimia, or preludes, were actually composed over centuries and used by poets to prepare for the singing or recitation of longer portions of the Homeric...
The Other Four Plays of Sophocles
Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2013
There are seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles. Three of them form the Theban Plays, which recount the story of Thebes during and after the reign of Oedipus. Here, David Slavitt translates the remaining tragedies—the "other four plays:" Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes.
Punchy...
by Homer
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2005
"Tell us, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, start in your own place:
when all the rest at Troy had fled from that steep doom
and gone back home, away from war and the salt sea,
only this man longed for his wife and a way home."
Homer's Odyssey, at once an exciting epic...
Unconscious Crime
Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
A sleepwalking, homicidal nursemaid; a "morally vacant" juvenile poisoner; a man driven to arson by a "lesion of the will"; an articulate and poised man on trial for assault who, while conducting his own defense, undergoes a profound personality change and becomes a wild and delusional...
by Michael Olesker
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2015
In Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore, veteran journalist Michael Olesker writes of Baltimore's melting pot in all its rollicking, sentimental, good-natured, and chaotic essence. The stories come from neighborhood street corners and front stoops, playgrounds and school rooms, churches and synagogues,...
by William J. Cobb
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2013
In The Lousy Adult, William J. Cobb reveals a world where love and respect collide with achievement and desire, a world where people often get what they want, yet must pay the price of alienation, remorse, and retribution in order to obtain it.
In "The Sea Horse," a teenage boy defends...