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The book that made the modern world, reissued in its definitive scholarly form and featuring a new foreword from Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.

First published in 1776, Adam Smith’s masterwork The Wealth of Nations formalized the first unified theory of modern economies—how human nature, public institutions, and private interests can coalesce in a society greater than the sum of its parts. More than 250 years later, it remains one of humanity’s most defining and lasting literary works.

This definitive edition includes Edwin Cannan’s famous annotations of the original text, accounting for both Smith’s early drafts and his lectures at the University of Glasgow, where he originated the book’s concepts. The result is the most complete edition of the work to date, maintaining unprecedented fidelity to Smith’s ideas and packaging them in fluent and elevating terms.

In a new foreword, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen offers context and contemporary incision for twenty-first-century readers, discussing the uses—and occasional misuses—of Smith’s ideas for the advancement of political agendas. The Wealth of Nations, Sen makes clear, is a book about societies, not just economies. “Smith’s economics accommodated his values,” he writes. As readers of The Wealth of Nations will discover and rediscover, those values prioritized the lives of everyday working people above all else.

A rare 19th‑century voice revealing what asylum life felt like from the inside.

In 1881, Joseph Camp, an elderly and self-trained Methodist minister from Talladega County in eastern Alabama, was brought by his family to Bryce Hospital, an insane asylum in Tuscaloosa, where he remained for over five months. Camp, misled by relatives concerning the purpose of the trip, was shocked and angered at his loss of freedom and his treatment in the hospital. After his release, he composed an account of his stay and published it at his own expense, providing a rare glimpse of 19th century mental health care from a patient’s viewpoint. Camp’s account reveals his naive trust in others, but also a sharp and retentive memory. Camp is remarkably accurate in his account of the details of his treatment and the operation and staff of the hospital, although his emotional assessments reflect his unhappiness with his situation. Adding to the importance of Camp’s account is the fact that in the 19th century Bryce was considered a remarkably humane institution focused on recovery. Camp provides a glimpse into how treatment for the insane felt to the recipient.

Published to great acclaim in French and now available for the first time in English, this groundbreaking book explores how the Nazi regime used sexuality to promote political loyalty, conformity, and cohesion among “ordinary” Germans. Beginning before the collapse of the Weimar Republic and continuing through the postwar American occupation of Germany, Elissa Mailänder’s study highlights the complex and conflicted ways that sexual “liberation,” repression, and violence were used and experienced in the everyday lives of citizens of the Reich. Her analysis draws on a vast array of sources, from legal dossiers to private photographs and letters, as well as public archives, magazines, and movies. Mailänder’s findings are often uncomfortable; she demonstrates, for example, that a significant number of women who were not persecuted by the regime saw shifts in gender and sexual norms as positive developments—ones that some felt were lost under the American occupation, with its own routines of military sexual exploitation. What emerges is a portrait of a regime that was less interested in repressing sexuality than in reinventing it according to a racist, elitist, and homophobic agenda.

An Intractable Wound explores Palestinian resistance to colonial fragmentation that originated as territorial fracture, as proposed through the United Nations partition plan that split the land between the state of Israel and Arab territories. The resulting fragmentation of geography, sovereignty, and populations spurred multiple other schisms that manifest culturally, politically, and developmentally across the West Bank, Gaza, refugee camps, exiled and diasporic Palestinians, and Arab citizens of Israel.

An Intractable Wound considers the various tactics Palestinians deploy to combat these multiple, intersecting iterations of fracture. In particular, this text considers Palestinian media technologies and practices that manage, subvert, and overcome fragmentation. Each chapter centers projects that elaborate on these fractures and combat them, including virtual reality representations, online archives, digital mapping platforms, and video games that imagine and construct an intact Palestinian community. Together, these case studies provide a capacious reading of the Palestinian condition as structured by fragmentation, and Palestinian resistance as struggling in opposition to that geographic, sociopolitical, and cultural disillusion.

Homer's Odyssey has captivated readers and influenced writers and artists for more than 2,000 years. Reading the poem in its original language provides an experience as challenging as it is rewarding. Most students encountering Homeric Greek for the first time need considerable help, especially with vocabulary and constructions that differ from the more familiar Attic forms. For anyone who has completed studies in elementary Greek, this edition provides the assistance necessary to read, understand, and appreciate the first book of the Odyssey in its original language.

Structured to maximize reading ease, P. A. Draper's volume stands out among introductions to the Greek Odyssey. Readers of this edition will appreciate the positioning of all notes facing the Greek text; the frequent vocabulary entries; the complete glossary; the appendix on basic Homeric forms and grammar; and the copious annotations on vocabulary, grammar, meter, historical and mythological allusions, and literary interpretation.

Primarily designed as a textbook, this volume will be an effective classroom tool and a useful acquisition for any library supporting a classics program. The book will find readers among high school and college Greek students, advanced students in Homer or epic poetry classes, graduate students working on reading-list requirements, and anyone interested in maintaining Greek reading skills.

The story of generations of Ojibwe women who built a thriving Indigenous home in the urban heart of Minneapolis

Minneapolis became home to White Earth Ojibwe people not through a centralized movement but through generations of determined, behind-the-scenes work by Ojibwe women. These women were organizing not in the streets, but in sewing clubs, churches, classrooms, and kitchens to bring people together and form interconnected communities. Rooted in care, tradition, and persistence, their labor laid the foundation for a thriving urban Indigenous population that continues to shape the city today.

An Ojibwe Home in the City tells the histories of Louise and Emily Peake, Winnie Jourdain, Ignatia Broker, and other Ojibwe women who endeavored to make space for Native families in South Minneapolis. From the 1930s through the 1970s, these women built institutions, secured services, and fought for culturally grounded education—all while working inside systems never intended for them. Their efforts led to the creation of vital community hubs such as the Division of Indian Work and the Minneapolis American Indian Center and helped ensure that future generations would stay connected to their culture, even in an urban setting.

Far broader than a local history, this book challenges what we think we know about Native activism in the twentieth century, shifting the focus from protest to perseverance and steady commitment. Intimate, compelling, and deeply grounded in community, An Ojibwe Home in the City is both a tribute and a revelation—an essential and personal account of how Indigenous women made a place for their people in a changing world.

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This substantial essay depicts urban collapse in an exceptionally difficult period of the Serbian capital. The author has marshalled facts, reflections, photographs and other imagesto demonstrate the transformation of Belgrade during the Milošević years. With the theoretical grounding of cultural anthropology, history studies, culture of memory, history of art, and urbanism, Mileta Prodanović considers changes to the built environment and urban landscape in the city in the 1990s. He covers many visual aspects of life with great ingenuity: shopping centers, unregulated construction and “wild” modifications of buildings, new buildings (broadcasting studios, shops, homes) that do not fit the surroundings, bad taste in home furnishings (camp, kitsch), boondoggles such as the international art center, problematic historical markers like the obelisk of the eternal flame, billboards, store displays, electoral propaganda, graffiti, grave-markers and cemetery memorials, coins and paper money, calendars, beer labels, and even religious icons (and more). All this information is provided with some critique and much implied comparison to past standards.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then on, they began publicly referring to one another as father and son within a couple years of meeting. In 1960, after nearly four decades together, and with Robert Allerton nearing ninety, they embarked on a daringly nonconformist move: Allerton legally adopted the sixty-year-old Gregg as his son, the first such adoption of an adult in Illinois history.

An Open Secret tells the striking story of these two iconoclasts, locating them among their queer contemporaries and exploring why becoming father and son made a surprising kind of sense for a twentieth-century couple who had every monetary advantage but one glaring problem: they wanted to be together publicly in a society that did not tolerate their love. Deftly exploring the nature of their design, domestic, and philanthropic projects, Nicholas L. Syrett illuminates how viewing the Allertons as both a same-sex couple and an adopted family is crucial to understanding their relationship’s profound queerness. By digging deep into the lives of two men who operated largely as ciphers in their own time, he opens up provocative new lanes to consider the diversity of kinship ties in modern US history.

The story of a Tuskegee Institute visionary who advised US presidents and led unprecedented advances in American Civil Rights

An Unassuming Heroism: The Life of Robert Russa Moton is a landmark biography that reveals the previously overlooked story of one of the most influential African American leaders of the twentieth century. Brian and Kevin McGovern trace Robert Moton’s life: from his birth as the son of freed people through his tenure as the leader of Tuskegee Institute directly after Booker T. Washington. Moton guided Tuskegee to new levels of excellence and international prominence, became an advisor to seven US presidents, and won their cooperation in the establishment of greater minority rights.

Rejecting conventional portrayals of Moton as a mere follower of Washington, the authors reveal an astute and increasingly independent leader who worked to bridge competing visions of Black advancement while championing broader African American rights, educational opportunities, and social justice. Through his investigations of issues such as racial discrimination in World War I, inequitable minority treatment during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, and Black people’s struggles to access healthcare and public accommodation, Moton helped shape national conversations on race and equality and advanced many arguments utilized by later Civil Rights leaders.

This biography offers a compelling reassessment of a courageous and visionary civic pioneer whose historical impact calls for renewed recognition. It is essential reading for scholars, students, and any reader interested in African American history, education, or progressive political leadership.
 

An alternate selection of the History Book Club and Military Book Club

Laurie Mercier's look at "community unionism" examines the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism fostered by residents in Anaconda, Montana, home to the world's largest copper smelter and the namesake of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. 

Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, incorporating the candid commentary of the locals ("the company furnished three pair of leather gloves . . . and all the arsenic [dust] you could eat"). During five decades of devoted unionism, locals embraced an "alternative Americanism" that championed improved living standards for working people as the best defense against communism. Mercier also explores how gender limits on women's political, economic, and social roles shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles, and traces how union rivalries, environmental concerns, and the 1980 closing of the Anaconda smelter transformed the town. 

A fascinating portrait of how community molds working class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights about the changing nature of working class culture and collective action.

The anarchist movement had a crucial impact upon the Mexican working class between 1860 and 1931. John M. Hart destroys some old myths and brings new information to light as he explores anarchism's effect on the development of the Mexican urban working-class and agrarian movements.

Hart shows how the ideas of European anarchist thinkers took root in Mexico, how they influenced revolutionary tendencies there, and why anarchism was ultimately unsuccessful in producing real social change in Mexico. He explains the role of the working classes during the Mexican Revolution, the conflict between urban revolutionary groups and peasants, and the ensuing confrontation between the new revolutionary elite and the urban working class.

The anarchist tradition traced in this study is extremely complex. It involves various social classes, including intellectuals, artisans, and ordinary workers; changing social conditions; and political and revolutionary events which reshaped ideologies. During the nineteenth century the anarchists could be distinguished from their various working- class socialist and trade unionist counterparts by their singular opposition to government. In the twentieth century the lines became even clearer because of hardening anarchosyndicalist, anarchistcommunist, trade unionist, and Marxist doctrines. In charting the rise and fall of anarchism, Hart gives full credit to the roles of other forms of socialism and Marxism in Mexican working-class history.

Mexican anarchists whose contributions are examined here include nineteenth-century leaders Plotino Rhodakanaty, Santiago Villanueva, Francisco Zalacosta, and José María Gonzales; the twentieth-century revolutionary precursor Ricardo Flores Magón; the Casa del Obrero founders Amadeo Ferrés, Juan Francisco Moncaleano, and Rafael Quintero; and the majority of the Centro Sindicalista Ubertario, leaders of the General Confederation of Workers.

This work is based largely on primary sources, and the bibliography contains a definitive listing of anarchist and radical working-class newspapers for the period.