History
Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci
Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer
Under the Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai
Fifteen Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (Woman in Gold, Gustav Klimt
American Gothic, Grant Wood
Guernica, Pablo Picasso
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Frida Kahlo
Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, Amy Sherald Discover the stories of how, why and what makes a masterpiece in this truly compelling and comprehensive work.
Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 - Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours." --Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery. Between 1873 and Comstock's death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These "sex radicals" supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women's right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women's stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.A Nation of Descendants traces Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries. Francesca Morgan examines how specific groups throughout history grappled with finding and recording their forebears, focusing on Anglo-American white, Mormon, African American, Jewish, and Native American people. Morgan also describes how individuals and researchers use genealogy for personal and scholarly purposes, and she explores how local businesspeople, companies like Ancestry.com, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots series powered the commercialization and commodification of genealogy.
T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources â sermons, diaries, letters â as well as novels, poems, and essays to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.