A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World explores tea as a global commodity whose history has been shaped by the transformations of capitalism and the regimes of empire and nationalism—the very forces, we might say, that have given us Starbucks.
To our Puritan, “agrarian” instincts, Hollywood is all that is wrong with America, the decadent city, the sin factory that has warped the culture beyond repair. Here is the trope of American declension.
Deetz’s Bound By Fire sets out to address our on-going gastronomic rehabilitation by focusing on the story of Virginia’s enslaved plantation cooks. She has taken on a difficult task, for those unsung chefs of the antebellum and colonial era left no cookery compilations or published sources behind.
Few historians so aptly make Grant and his time so legible to a 21st-century readership that continues to grapple with the political legacies of slavery and the Civil War.
In an engaging, well-written, exhaustively-researched, even-handed, and insightful book, Patrick Iber not only brings to light previously obscure aspects of this story but also details the complexities and contradictions that bedeviled all sides of the struggle.
Shocking True Story is a good, though by no means exhaustive or thorough, account of Confidential, Hollywood’s publication of record for prurient interests.
Day’s characters seemed to give her fans not only a coping fantasy but a sense of inspiration. One of the problems with the intelligentsia is that it will not respect or take seriously any fantasy that is not built on some idea or resistance to hegemony, which Day’s fantasy clearly was not.
The OO7 Diaries reveals filmmaking as both a nearly heroic exercise in tenacity and an astonishingly pure expression of absurdity.
If at times we are perplexed and frustrated by Frederick Douglass and other times galvanized and inspired, it is only because he lived in our most perplexing and frustrating time as a nation.
Fitzharris takes readers from the pre-Listerian surgical theaters replete with pathogenic microorganisms and decaying bodies to sterile hospital wards filled with recovering patients.
