SOCIETY

Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. Learn More

On an Irish Island is a love letter to a vanished way of life, in which Robert Kanigel, the highly praised author of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, tells the story of the Great Blasket, a wildly beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland, renowned during the early twentieth century for the rich communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke. Learn More

"When did we start dressing girls in pink and boys in blue?" Learn More

First released in 2000, Safe Area Gorazde confirmed Sacco as one of the pre-eminent journalists of his time, and earned him a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. Now for its 10th anniversary, Fantagraphics is releasing an expanded hardcover edition which, much like 2007’s Palestine: The Special Edition, supplements the original work with page after page of special features, listed below. Learn More

The ever erudite, always delightfully curious Simon Schama returns with Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, a wonderful compendium of thirty provocative, witty, enlightening, and stimulating essays previously published but collected in a single volume for the first time. One of our most distinguished historians and commentators, Schama, the acclaimed author of The American Future: A History, explores an amazing diversity of topics—from the political to the personal, from the earth-shaking to the mundane, from ice cream to Churchill to Hurricane Katrina and everything in-between. In Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, Simon Schama opens up his—and our—wide world to us. Learn More

Memories of an Irish-American growing up log-shack poor in small-town Ohio. Learn More

The tortuous path from Nixon to Reagan—think Archie Bunker, Dog Day Afternoon, and Merle Haggard—in a major new work on the cultural and political history of the 1970s, from a prizewinning historian. Learn More

Like the typewriter and the light bulb, the heterosexual was invented in the 1860s and swiftly and permanently transformed Western culture. The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. Learn More

This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history. Learn More