When you hear the words "Boston sports," does your mind flash to a place or to a person? Do you think of a fly ball arching over the Green Monster, a Celtic breaking across the parquet at Boston Garden, rowers skimming along the Charles River in autumn, or runners tackling the grueling stretch of "Heartbreak Hill" during the Boston Marathon? Or do you conjure faces--a smiling Babe Ruth, a bearded Bill Russell, a determined Rocky Marciano, a boyish and nimble Bobby Orr, or a defiant Pedro Martinez? Most likely, it is impossible to separate the two, impossible to imagine Bob Cousy on any court other than the Garden or Ted Williams playing at any field other than Fenway. Certain people and places are as inseparable as heads and tails on a penny.

The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub is a collection of original essays about the people and places that live in the minds and memories of Bostonians and all Americans. From the Boston of the young Bambino and even younger Francis Ouimet to the glories and agonies of 1986 and the struggles to keep the Patriots in town, each chapter focuses on the games and the athletes, but also on which sports have defined Boston and Bostonians. In a city of deep ethnic and class divisions, sports have provided a common ground, an intense shared experience. Pursuing the legend and the lore, these essays celebrate the players, the games, and the arenas that are at the heart of the city of Boston.

During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.

In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate Mexico's cultural heritage as the United States' own. He focuses in particular on five well-known figures—American writer and amateur archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens, British architect Frederick Catherwood, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the French émigré photographers Désiré Charnay and Augustus Le Plongeon. Setting these figures in historical and cultural context, Evans uncovers their varying motives, including the Manifest Destiny-inspired desire to create a national museum of American antiquities in New York City, the attempt to identify the ancient Maya as part of the Lost Tribes of Israel (and so substantiate the Book of Mormon), and the hope of proving that ancient Mesoamerica was the cradle of North American and even Northern European civilization. Fascinating stories in themselves, these accounts of the first explorers also add an important new chapter to the early history of Mesoamerican archaeology.

Displaying gleaming new shopping centers and refurbished row houses, Harlem today bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s widely noted “Second Renaissance” to a surprising source: the radical 1960s social movements that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny.

In the post–World War II era, large-scale government-backed redevelopment drove the economic and physical transformation of urban neighborhoods. But in the 1960s, young Harlem activists inspired by the civil rights movement recognized urban renewal as one more example of a power structure that gave black Americans little voice in the decisions that most affected them. They demanded the right to plan their own redevelopment and founded new community-based organizations to achieve that goal. In the following decades, those organizations became the crucibles in which Harlemites debated what their streets should look like and who should inhabit them. Radical activists envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African-American population.

In the succeeding decades, however, community-based organizations came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. In charting the history that transformed Harlem by the twenty-first century, The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.

In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics—who they were and where they had come from—in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration.

In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.

A new history of Rotary International shows how the organization reinforced capitalist values and cultural practices at home and tried to remake the world in the idealized image of Main Street America.

Rotary International was born in Chicago in 1905. By the time World War II was over, the organization had made good on its promise to “girdle the globe.” Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism explores the meteoric rise of a local service club that brought missionary zeal to the spread of American-style economics and civic ideals.

Brendan Goff traces Rotary’s ideological roots to the business progressivism and cultural internationalism of the United States in the early twentieth century. The key idea was that community service was intrinsic to a capitalist way of life. The tone of “service above self” was often religious, but, as Rotary looked abroad, it embraced Woodrow Wilson’s secular message of collective security and international cooperation: civic internationalism was the businessman’s version of the Christian imperial civilizing mission, performed outside the state apparatus. The target of this mission was both domestic and global. The Rotarian, the organization’s publication, encouraged Americans to see the world as friendly to Main Street values, and Rotary worked with US corporations to export those values. Case studies of Rotary activities in Tokyo and Havana show the group paving the way for encroachments of US power—economic, political, and cultural—during the interwar years.

Rotary’s evangelism on behalf of market-friendly philanthropy and volunteerism reflected a genuine belief in peacemaking through the world’s “parliament of businessmen.” But, as Goff makes clear, Rotary also reinforced American power and interests, demonstrating the tension at the core of US-led internationalism.

Even before there was a road, there was a route. Buffalo trails, Indian paths, the old Santa Fe trace—all led across the Great Plains and the western mountains to the golden oasis of California. America’s insatiable westering urge culminated in Route 66, the highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. Opened in 1926, Route 66 became the quintessential American road. It offered the chance for freedom and a better life, whether you were down-and-out Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s or cool guys cruising in a Corvette in the 1960s. Even though the interstates long ago turned Route 66 into a bylane, it still draws travelers from around the world who long to experience the freedom of the open road.

A Route 66 Companion gathers fiction, poetry, memoir, and oral history to present a literary historical portrait of America’s most storied highway. From accounts of pioneering trips across the western plains to a sci-fi fantasy of traveling Route 66 in a rocket, here are stories that explore the mystique of the open road, told by master storytellers ranging from Washington Irving to Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Leslie Marmon Silko, and John Steinbeck. Interspersed among them are reminiscences that, for the first time, honor the varied cultures—Native American, Mexican American, and African American, as well as Anglo—whose experiences run through the Route 66 story like the stripe down the highway. So put the top down, set the cruise control, and “make that California trip” with A Route 66 Companion.

The fossil fuel revolution is usually rendered as a tale of historic advances in energy production. In this perspective-changing account, Christopher F. Jones instead tells a story of advances in energy access—canals, pipelines, and wires that delivered power in unprecedented quantities to cities and factories at a great distance from production sites. He shows that in the American mid-Atlantic region between 1820 and 1930, the construction of elaborate transportation networks for coal, oil, and electricity unlocked remarkable urban and industrial growth along the eastern seaboard. But this new transportation infrastructure did not simply satisfy existing consumer demand—it also whetted an appetite for more abundant and cheaper energy, setting the nation on a path toward fossil fuel dependence.

Between the War of 1812 and the Great Depression, low-cost energy supplied to cities through a burgeoning delivery system allowed factory workers to mass-produce goods on a scale previously unimagined. It also allowed people and products to be whisked up and down the East Coast at speeds unattainable in a country dependent on wood, water, and muscle. But an energy-intensive America did not benefit all its citizens equally. It provided cheap energy to some but not others; it channeled profits to financiers rather than laborers; and it concentrated environmental harms in rural areas rather than cities.

Today, those who wish to pioneer a more sustainable and egalitarian energy order can learn valuable lessons from this history of the nation’s first steps toward dependence on fossil fuels.

Many westerners used to call the Soviet Union "Russia." Russians too regarded it as their country, but that did not mean they were entirely happy with it. In the end, in fact, Russia actually destroyed the Soviet Union. How did this happen, and what kind of Russia emerged?

In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. One of the keys lies in messianism--the idea rooted in Russian Orthodoxy that the Russians were a "chosen people." The communists reshaped this notion into messianic socialism, in which the Soviet order would lead the world in a new direction. Neither vision, however, fit the "community spirit" of the Russian people, and the resulting clash defined the Soviet world.

Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. He discusses the severe dislocations resulting from collectivization and industrialization; the relationship between ethnic Russians and other Soviet peoples; the dramatic effects of World War II on ideas of homeland and patriotism; the separation of "Russian" and "Soviet" culture; leadership and the cult of personality; and the importance of technology in the Soviet world view.

At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire. There is no surer guide than Geoffrey Hosking to reveal the historical forces forging Russian identity in the post-communist world.

At its zenith in the early twentieth century, the British Empire ruled nearly one-quarter of the world’s inhabitants. As they worked to exercise power in diverse and distant cultures, British authorities relied to a surprising degree on the science of mind. Ruling Minds explores how psychology opened up new possibilities for governing the empire. From the mental testing of workers and soldiers to the use of psychoanalysis in development plans and counterinsurgency strategy, psychology provided tools for measuring and managing the minds of imperial subjects. But it also led to unintended consequences.

Following researchers, missionaries, and officials to the far corners of the globe, Erik Linstrum examines how they used intelligence tests, laboratory studies, and even dream analysis to chart abilities and emotions. Psychology seemed to offer portable and standardized forms of knowledge that could be applied to people everywhere. Yet it also unsettled basic assumptions of imperial rule. Some experiments undercut the racial hierarchies that propped up British dominance. Others failed to realize the orderly transformation of colonized societies that experts promised and officials hoped for. Challenging our assumptions about scientific knowledge and empire, Linstrum shows that psychology did more to expose the limits of imperial authority than to strengthen it.