August 30, 2022
The neighborhood takes center stage in Linda Stone-Ferrier‘s interdisciplinary study, The Little Street: The Neighborhood in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Culture. Engaging the work of Johannes Vermeer—from whose painting View… READ MORE
July 28, 2022
The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring… READ MORE
February 25, 2022
To better understand the Russia-Ukraine crisis, we have put together a list of the most relevant books that shed light on the history, socio-economic and political relations of these two… READ MORE
February 24, 2022
Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. The… READ MORE
September 23, 2021
Nina Rattner Gelbart— Biography is a curious genre, morphing over time, and writing about the lives of other individuals goes back to antiquity. Plutarch and Suetonius, both working from the… READ MORE
September 6, 2021
Henry Kamen— Among the most serious environmental issues in preindustrial Europe was that of the disappearance of forests, which had at one time covered the greater part of the land… READ MORE
August 31, 2021
Nicholas Orme— This is a scene from a fifteenth-century stained-glass window at Doddiscombsleigh: a country church in Devon, in the south-west of England. It shows what would have been a… READ MORE
August 20, 2021
Kevin Madigan— Around 1870, evangelical Christians, as their Catholic adversaries would put it, “invaded” Italy in large numbers. Before unification and the inception of a new liberal order, the extension… READ MORE
August 3, 2021
Ashley L. Cohen— On a winter evening a man sits by his fireside, waiting for the serene quiet of his country retirement to be interrupted by the delivery of a… READ MORE
July 22, 2021
Margarette Lincoln— So wrote John Donne, poet and priest, who described London in the 1600s as “a place full of danger and vanity and vice,” neatly encapsulating its horror and… READ MORE
Space Day Reading List 2024