Besides Berlin, Budapest was the fastest-growing capital city in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Parlor and Kitchen, the work of a microhistorian and historical anthropologist, describes the development of private spaces in this newly emerged metropolis.

Author Gábor Gyáni has chosen two distinct groups of contemporary society: the upper middle class and the working class, to present their homes, domestic culture and attitudes. At the same time the book offers a panoramic view of the everyday life of the entire society, on social segregation and mobility. Behind the visual details the author reveals a great deal about the value systems of the groups of society investigated.

Reconstructing minute details as well as case studies, the author has relied on archival sources, private documents, and statistical data. The text is accompanied by contemporary photographs, maps and blueprints.

This enlightening and interesting volume will be of interest not only to historians, anthropologists and sociologists, but also to the general reader with an interest in urban history.

Gábor Gyáni is founder and editor of the quarterly Budapest Review of Books. He is President of the Hungarian-American Historians' Committee and Secretary of the Urban History Workshop of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

A student of the late professor Péter Hanák, Gyáni is active in research into the urban and social history of modern Hungary and the theory and methodology of history writing. 

The first full-length study to explore, analyze, and critically engage with intimacy in a world where the digital is embedded in everyday life.

Postdigital Intimacies is a timely collection of research into the complex interplay between digital and nondigital relationships. From vibey social media experiences to shared activism, access to online mental health care, and exposure to harm, the book reveals the social, political, and cultural implications of intimacy in a blurry public-private.

A Promise in Haiti is Curnutte's story of his time, spanning the last decade, living among several families in Gonaives, a city of 200,000 people a hundred kilometers north of Port-au-Prince. He began traveling to Haiti as a volunteer with the aid organization Hands Together, eventually building trust and credibility with many Haitians. Curnutte introduces the reader to the Cenecharles family, strained by entrenched unemployment and the need to continually travel for work. He is invited into the home of the Henrisma family, and is forced to reconcile journalistic detachment with basic compassion as he contributes financially to help them. The reader is confronted with a complicated, conflicted written and photographic record of a worldview that evolves right on the page. As a reporter, Curnutte found parallels between the lives he encountered in Gonaives and the world of the Great Depression recounted in James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee and Evans loom large as a challenge and inspiration to Curnutte.

The result is equal parts homage to that historic chronicle, on-the-ground reporting, and introspective narrative on the lessons Gonaives taught Curnutte about his own life and family. In late February 2010, Curnutte went back to Haiti on assignment, but conditions made it impossible for him to return to Gonaives. The resulting frustration provoked a meditation on the monumental challenges that face Haiti -- and on the destructive cycle of international attention that constantly moves on to "The Next Big Story."

Protected Children, Regulated Mothers examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma.