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The ‘unbearable 80s’, as the last decade of the Ceauşescu era has been called in Romania, are in the focus of this quasi-autobiographical work. The book vividly portrays the difficulties encountered by a young intellectual trying to shape himself under the oppressive regime and provides a stark depiction of a man’s intellectual suffocation under hard-line socialist rule. 

The visionary voice who helped shape American Judaism—and Charleston’s cultural soul.

Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788–1828 is a richly detailed biography that brings to life one of early America’s most fascinating and underappreciated Jewish intellectuals. Gary Phillip Zola offers a compelling portrait of Harby—a playwright, newspaper editor, drama critic, educator, and religious reformer—who emerged as a central figure in Charleston’s vibrant cultural scene during the early 19th century. At a time when Charleston was experiencing both economic prosperity and cultural efflorescence, Harby stood at the crossroads of literary ambition and religious innovation.

A descendant of Sephardic Jews, Harby was deeply engaged in the intellectual and civic life of his city. He founded a literary journal at just eighteen, established a private academy, and wrote prolifically on politics, education, and religion. But his most enduring legacy lies in his role as a pioneer of Reform Judaism in America. As a founding member of the Reformed Society of Israelites in 1825, Harby advocated for a rational, modernized approach to Jewish worship—one that emphasized universal ethics and intellectual engagement over ritual formalism. His efforts, though controversial in his time, laid the groundwork for the broader Reform movement that would flourish later in the century.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, including Harby’s personal library and writings, Zola’s biography not only illuminates Harby’s life and thought but also offers a window into the broader cultural, religious, and political transformations of the early American republic. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in American Jewish history, Southern intellectual life, and the roots of religious reform in the United States.

What was life like under the Third Reich? What went on between parents and children?  What were the prevailing attitudes about sex, morality, religion? How did workers perceive the effects of the New Order in the workplace? What were the cultural currents—in art, music, science, education, drama, and on the radio?

Professor Mosse’s extensive analysis of Nazi culture—groundbreaking upon its original publication in 1966—is now offered to readers of a new generation. Selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German.

By recapturing the texture of culture and thought under the Third Reich, Mosse’s work still resonates today—as a document of everyday life in one of history’s darkest eras and as a living memory that reminds us never to forget.

Exploring how New Deal innovation transformed archaeology in the American South.

New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee tells the engrossing story of Southeastern archaeology in the 1930s. The Tennessee Valley Authority Act of May 1933 initiated an ambitious program of flood control and power generation by way of a chain of hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River. The construction of these dams flooded hundreds of thousands of square miles of river bottoms, campsites, villages, and towns that had been homes to Native Americans for centuries. This triggered an urgent need to undertake extensive archaeological fieldwork throughout the region. Those studies continue to influence contemporary archaeology.

The state of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley were especially well suited research targets thanks to their mild climate and long field seasons. A third benefit in the 1930s was the abundance of labor supplied by Tennesseans unemployed during the Great Depression. Within months of the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, teams of archaeologists fanned out across the state and region under the farsighted direction of Smithsonian Institution curators Neil M. Judd, Frank H. H. Roberts, and Frank M. Setzler. The early months of 1934 would become the busiest period of archaeological fieldwork in US history.

The twelve insightful essays in New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee document and explore this unique peak in archaeological study. Chapters highlight then-new techniques such as mound “peeling” and stratigraphic excavation adapted from the University of Chicago; the four specific New Deal sites of Watts Bar Reservoir, Mound Bottom, Pack, and Chickamauga Basin; bioarchaeology in the New Deal; and the enduring impact of the New Deal on contemporary fieldwork.

The challenges of the 1930s in recruiting skilled labor, training unskilled ancillary labor, developing and improvising new field methods, and many aspects of archaeological policies, procedures, and best-practices laid much of the foundation of contemporary archaeological practice. New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee offers an invaluable record of that pivotal time for professional, student, and amateur archaeologists.