Michelle Stein Yale Press’s books manage to take the reader all across the world, and look in depth at a great many topics. They also have a great many books that delve into the city of New York, where I was born and have thoroughly explored. I hope to also
As reported by the Yale Daily News earlier this month, the new Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and Modernity was announced by Ned Blackhawk, a Yale professor of History and American Studies, and Christopher Rogers, Editorial Director of Yale University Press. Cloud was the first known Native American
Between 1917 and 1937, Alfred Stieglitz took 331 photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Along with the thousands of letters the two exchanged throughout their 30-year romance, these photographs occupy a sort of middle ground between documentation and expression, between correspondence and art. They are an eloquent testament to a profound and
In The Flowering of New England, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 19th century Boston, historian Van Wyck Brooks creates an American mythology of individuals. Falling somewhere between collective biography and literary narrative, the book tracks a flourishing of intellectual output concentrated in the Boston area between the War of 1812
On a surface level, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire exposes and defends an overlooked narrative in American history. His book tells the story of the Comanche people, from their first mention in the ledgers of a Spanish colonial official in 1706 to their decimation by famine and an expanding United States
While the Great Depression has been a heavily referenced subject, almost exclusively in its negative sense, it’s worth considering the aesthetic aspects of the period that appeared and endured alongside, or in spite of, worldwide economic restraints. At a time when the United States had emerged as a world power
In the prologue to Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, historian Nicholas Phillipson acknowledges the difficulty of writing about a man who left little to write about. A fastidious author and scholar who disdained any prospect of misinterpretation, Smith had his letters, notes, and unfinished manuscripts destroyed before his death in
Dorothy Rabinowitz’s op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Why Obama is No Roosevelt” comes from the comparisons made to FDR that have followed President Obama since the run-up to the 2008 election. In September 2010, The National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the recession was over in June
A few weeks ago, we celebrated Columbus Day and the discovery of America. Or at least he made the physical discovery, and even that is contested. What other Americas were there to discover? One might say: the political discovery of the American Republic’s early successes. Alexis de Tocqueville and his
Perhaps the most famous imperial garden in the Western imagination is that of the thirteenth-century Mongol emperor and founder of the Chinese Yuan dynasty, Khubilai Khan. Immortalized by the vivid and haunting poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “Kubla Khan,” Khan’s garden is an elaborate synthesis of natural and manmade