European History

Images of Space: Then and Now

Photographs from this month’s Perseid meteor shower from the International Space Station follow a long tradition of science and art blurring boundaries between each other. As curator Susan Dackerman argues in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, the catalog for Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition opening September 6, art and science often have a close relationship with only vaguely definable boundaries.

Propaganda As Art?: Windows on the War

Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, edited by Art Institute of Chicago curators Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas Druick to accompany an exhibition on view there until October 23, 2011, examines an art form that had been forgotten until now. The stenciled, handmade posters made by the Soviet TASS news agency during WWII are now available to the English-speaking public for the first time.

Proust Ink

Leading Proust scholar William C. Carter has started a website “devoted to studying and celebrating the life and works of Marcel Proust” that offers both a wealth of literary resources and an online course. Along with University of Alabama at Birmingham student Nicolas D. Drogoul, Carter has launched Proust Ink

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J’Accuse! (Heard That One Before?)

On February 7, 1898, French writer Émile Zola was brought to trial for libel in his publication of “J’Accuse” in L’Aurore, a daily, leftist paper in Paris. His indictment of the French military’s treatment of the Drefyus Affair catapulted the anti-Semitic, pro-nationalist conspiracy to international recognition. The sympathetic camp of

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Tuesday Studio: Art For All

This summer, the Yale Center for British Art is presenting the exhibition Art for All: British Posters for Transport.  The show is based around Henry S. Hacker’s collection of promotional posters designed in the primarily 1930s for the London Underground and British Railway system.  The works are exceptional examples both

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Happy birthday to a man who (may have) thought it better to be feared than loved

Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine public servant and political theorist best known for his brief yet highly influential work of political philosophy, The Prince, was born on this day in 1469. Though the man’s name may be now synonymous with cunning and deceitful political tactics, the debate as to whether Machiavelli’s

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“Railway” exhibit leaves WSJ reporter “wanting more”

Today’s Wall Street Journal features an enthusiastic review of the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s exhibit “Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America, and the Railway, 1830-1960,” in which the author praises the “outstanding” essays collected in the accompanying catalog published by the Yale University Press. With more than 250 illustrations, The

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Literature of Liberty

The positive reviews for Renee Winegarten’s Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography continue to pour in. On the heels of Michael Dirda’s glowing review in the Washington Post Book World (June 8), which called attention to the “blazing life” of the two leads, Louis Auchincloss praised the

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ForeWord Magazine Honors YUP

We are pleased to announce that ForeWord Magazine has honored several of our titles with awards in this year’s Books of the Year list. Dr. Arthur W. Perry’s Straight Talk About Cosmetic Surgery took the Gold Prize in the Health category. Harold J. Cook’s Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and

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Yale University Press mines data from Soviet archives

On Sunday The Boston Globe ran a profile of Jonathan Brent, the associate director and editorial director of Yale University Press and the executive editor of the Annals of Communism Series. The series is a 20-book project that “provides new and vivid details from documents that have been mined by

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