Established to calm intracolonial tensions, the Mason-Dixon Line first marked a region of breakneck development and Native American resistance, then the boundary between pro- and antislavery regimes. Edward Gray’s is the first comprehensive history of the line and its dynamic role in the US from the colonial period to the Civil War—and beyond.

Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English. This book celebrates the masses—their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives.

Exposes the unrealistic assumptions of the rational expectations and real business cycle approaches and of mainstream finance theory. This title argues that in separating monetary and financial behavior from real behavior, they do not address the ways that consumption, accumulation, and the government play in the workings of the economy.

While the birth of global economic governance is conventionally dated to the end of World War II, Jamie Martin shows how its roots lie in World War I and its aftermath. The Meddlers explores the intense political struggles about sovereignty and self-governance provoked by the first attempts to govern global capitalism.

William Tecumseh Sherman’s memoirs are a key record of Civil War history and memory. With extensive commentary and a new introduction, this annotated edition highlights Sherman’s revisions in response to his critics and contextualizes people, places, and events that loomed large for nineteenth-century readers but have since become obscure.

As immigrants and others are engulfed by dominant societies, the connection to their ancestral tongues is routinely severed. Julie Sedivy takes on the science and politics of language loss, offering lessons for the renewal and preservation of heritage languages, alongside her own moving story of language loss and accompanying personal crisis.

The instructional treatises of Menander Rhetor and the Ars Rhetorica, deriving from the schools of rhetoric that flourished in the Greek East from the 2nd through 4th centuries AD, provide a window into the literary culture, educational practices, and social concerns of these Greeks under Roman rule, in both public and private life.

The Mending of Broken Bones reveals that far from a set of mundane exercises, algebra is the delicate craft of untangling numerical puzzles to uncover the hidden patterns and surprising behaviors of the numbers themselves. As Paul Lockhart shows, you don’t have to be a mathematician to experience the joy and creativity of mathematical discovery.