Profiles the early life, career, family, and contributions of the fifth president of the United States.

Follows the life of George Washington, including his childhood, education, employment, political career, and term of presidency.

Whether Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Islamic mosques, Buddhist temples, or the gathering places for other faiths, buildings designed for worship are significant to both their own community of believers and their larger communities. Coming to understand the history of places of worship, therefore, is an essential element in understanding the historical fabric of these communities. “Places of Worship” offers the abundant insights of an...

Filip Müller came to Auschwitz with one of the earliest transports from Slovakia in April 1942 and began working in the gassing installations and crematoria in May. He was still alive when the gassings ceased in November 1944. He saw millions come and disappear, by sheer luck he survived. Müller is neither a historian nor a psychologist, he is a source, one of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it. Eyewitness...

Jane M. Gaines examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, she analyzes copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

Robert Allen's compelling book examines burlesque not only as popular entertainment but also as a complex and transforming cultural phenomenon. When Lydia Thompson and her controversial female troupe of "British Blondes" brought modern burlesque to the United States in 1868, the result was electric. Their impertinent humor, streetwise manner, and provocative parodies of masculinity brought them enormous popular success--and the condemnation of critics,...

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football, the first contemporary book about football's formative years. American football began in the 1870's as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following,...