Titles

Since 1990, the number of mandated vaccines has increased dramatically. Today, a fully vaccinated child will have received nearly three dozen vaccinations between birth and age six. Along with the increase in number has come a growing wave of concern among parents about the unintended side effects of vaccines. In Vaccine, Mark A. Largent explains the history of the debate and identifies issues that parents, pediatricians, politicians, and public health officials must address. Nearly 40% of...

In 1994, Peter J. Hotez's nineteen-month-old daughter, Rachel, was diagnosed with autism. Dr. Hotez, a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the world's poorest people, became troubled by the decades-long rise of the influential anti-vaccine community and its inescapable narrative around childhood vaccines and autism. In Vaccines Did...

Over the course of the twentieth century, the relationship between Americans and their domestic animals has changed dramatically. In the 1890s, pets were a luxury, horses were the primary mode of transport, and nearly half of all Americans lived or worked on farms. Today, the pet industry is a multibillion-dollar-a-year business, keeping horses has become an expensive hobby, and consumers buy milk and meat in pristine supermarkets. Veterinarians have been very much...

The stories of the shadowy networks and wealthy people who bankrolled and sustained Las Vegas's continuous reinvention are well documented in works of scholarship, journalism, and popular culture. Yet no one has studied closely and over a long period of time the dynamics of the workforce—the casino and hotel workers and their relations with the companies they work for and occasionally strike against. James P. Kraft here explores the rise and changing fortunes of organized...

We have learned not to take food seriously: we eat as much as we want of what we want when we want it, and we seldom think about the health and environmental consequences of our choices. But the fact is that every choice we make has an impact on our health and on the environment. In The Vegetarian Imperative, Anand M. Saxena, a scientist and a vegetarian for most of his life, explains why we need to make better choices: for better health, to eliminate world hunger, and, ultimately, to save the planet. Our...

Originally published in 1997. In 1985 Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began. The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic...

This major study by Frederic Lane tracks the rise and decline of the great shipbuilding industry of Renaissance Venice. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, Lane presents detailed descriptions of the Venetian arsenal, including the great galleys that doubled as cargo ships and warships; the sixteenth-century round ships, which introduced dramatic innovations in rigging; and the majestic galleons, whose straight lines and greater speed made them ideal for...

Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argues, coexistence and cooperation were more common. Moving beyond the "clash of...

Venice Reconsidered offers a dynamic portrait of Venice from the establishment of the Republic at the end of the thirteenth century to its fall to Napoleon in 1797. In contrast to earlier efforts to categorize Venice's politics as strictly republican and its society as rigidly tripartite and hierarchical, the scholars in this volume present a more fluid and complex interpretation of Venetian culture. Drawing on a...

Perhaps more than in any other city, Venice has been shaped by its environment. The lagoon on which it was built isolated the city's inhabitants from mainland Europe, forcing them to look seaward for their survival and to establish a maritime empire that generated incalculable wealth, making Venice the envy of Renaissance Europe. In Venice Triumphant, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan provides a rich, multilayered history of Venice from Roman times to the...

Originally published in 1966. This book collects papers and essays written by historian Frederic C. Lane, who specialized in medieval Venetian history.

Renaissance Venice is generally portrayed as a city of harmony and consensus. This book offers a sharply different view by highlighting the history of religious dissent in this early modern city. Drawing on sixteenth-century records from archives of the Roman Inquisition, John Jeffries Martin reconstructs the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics—those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform. Among them were...

Combining engrossing detail and magisterial overview, Venice, A Maritime Republic traces the history of Venice from its origins in the sixth century through its rise and decline as the first modern empire of Europe. "Among the many cities men have made," Frederic C. Lane writes, "Venice stands out as a symbol of beauty, of wise government, and of communally controlled capitalism." Drawing on a lifetime of study and reflection, the author shows how that resplendent city came to have the...

Carl and Evelyn Ernst have completely revised their landmark reference Venomous Reptiles of North America to present the most comprehensive review of these animals in years. Volume One of this definitive work presents dramatically improved species accounts of the venomous lizards and elapid and viperid snakes found north of Mexico's twenty-fifth parallel. Volume...

Face lifts, nose jobs, breast implants, liposuction, collagen injections—the body at the end of the twentieth century has become endlessly mutable, and surgical alteration has become an accepted part of American culture. In Venus Envy, Elizabeth Haiken traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources—personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical journals, and beauty guides—Haiken reveals...

Covering crucial topics from morphology and behavior to ecology and zoogeography, Donald Linzey's popular textbook, Vertebrate Biology, has long been recognized as the most comprehensive and readable resource on vertebrates for students and educators. Thoroughly updated with the latest research, this new edition discusses taxa and topics such as •systematics and evolution •zoogeography, ecology, morphology, and reproduction •early chordates •fish,...

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian...

Originally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent...

In Victorians Undone, renowned British historian Kathryn Hughes follows five iconic figures of the nineteenth century as they encounter the world not through their imaginations or intellects but through their bodies. Or rather, through their body parts. Using the vivid language of admiring glances, cruel sniggers, and implacably turned backs, Hughes crafts a narrative of cinematic quality by combining a series of truly eye-opening and deeply intelligent accounts of life in...

In Victory of Law, Deak Nabers examines developing ideas about the nature of law as reflected in literary and political writing before, during, and after the American Civil War. Nabers traces the evolution of antislavery thought from its pre-war opposition to the constitutional order of the young nation to its ultimate elevation of the U.S. Constitution as an expression of the ideal of justice—an ideal embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment. ...