Historian, professor and data scientist Jo Guldi turns the David and Goliath story of the 19th century Irish Land Wars to show how a small band of revolutionary Irish peasants—pioneering nonviolent activism and minting ideas like rent control and land transfer—took on the British Empire and won their land back from absentee landlords.The War Over Rent is one part gripping, under-told history, one part recipe for agitation. The victory of what historians te...

How should historians speak truth to power – and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history – especially long-term history – so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage identify a recent shi...

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors. The book opens with a rogue's gallery of errors, then tours the ground-breaking analyses that have resulted from collaborations between humanists and data scientists. Jo Guldi explores how text mining can give a g...

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world“An epic work of breathtaking scope and moral power, The Long Land War offers the definitive account of the rise and fall of land rights around the world over the last 150 years.” —Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American CityJo Guldi tells t...

Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking.In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway networ...

Historian, professor and data scientist Jo Guldi turns the David and Goliath story of the 19th century Irish Land Wars to show how a small band of revolutionary Irish peasants—pioneering nonviolent activism and minting ideas like rent control and land transfer—took on the British Empire and won their land back from absentee landlords.The War Over Rent is one part gripping, under-told history, one part recipe for agitation. The victory of what historians te...

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the worldJo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, a...

**“Fascinating.” —Jill Lepore, The New YorkerA sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on our world.**From facial recognition—capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that go...

The second volume of the bestselling landmark work on the history of the modern stateWriting in The Wall Street Journal, David Gress called Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order "magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition." In The New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind described the book as "a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time." And in The Washington Post, G...

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that...

This issue of Profession contains Sidonie Smith’s introduction to her Presidential Forum (held at the 2011 MLA convention) and the essays of forum participants Hillary Chute, Marianne Hirsch, Leigh Gilmore, Craig Howes, Françoise Lionnet, Nancy K. Miller, David Palumbo-Liu, Brian Rotman, Leo Spitzer, Robert Warrior, and Gillian L. Whitlock. The issue also features a section on evaluating digital scholarship. Introduced by Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen, the section i...

SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY and THE HERALD BOOKS OF THE YEARThe Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women and children have sought their fortunes in every conceivable walk of life and in every imaginable climate across the British Empire, the United States and elsewhere, from finance to industry, philosophy to politics.To the Ends of the Earth puts this extraordinary epi...