Morrissey is a cult figure. But what drives his fans devotion? What makes them trek halfway round the world to catch his shows in the US or South America when he is playing in their city a few months later? Why do they fight over pieces of his shirt, thrown each night into the crowd? Is this healthy? Should they seek help? Is Moz messainic or does he calculatedly whip the mob into a frenzy to maintain his status? And what of Morrisseys own adolescence and his obssessions with 50s rock n ro...

In this book, J. Matthew Jacobson covers his four decade long battle with social awkwardness and abstract thinking. The author recounts his personal life and events that have culminated into his self-realization and exploration of High Functioning Autism (formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome) and the Autism Spectrum Disorder that has lurked in his shadows, terrorizing relationships and maximizing his creative genius.He explores the various traits that have plagued his social inter...

Author Andrew Dickson White was the co-founder and inaugural President of Cornell University and member of Yale's secret Skull and Bones society. He served many positions, including New York Senator, Ambassador to Russia, and Ambassador to Germany.This incredible study, originally compiled over 100 years ago and used for university lectures, articulately describes the actions and thought processes that fueled the collapse of the French economic system.With far less articula...

When 20-year-old Odetta Holmes-classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson”-veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s coffee houses, she was making one of the most portentous decisions in the history of both American music and Civil Rights.Released the same year as her famous rendition of “I'm on My Way” a...

A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: D...

In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and polit...

Phenomenology and the Arts develops the interplay between phenomenology as a historical movement and a descriptive method within Continental philosophy and the arts. Divided into five themes, the book explores first how the phenomenological method itself is a kind of artistic endeavor that mirrors what it approaches when it turns to describe paintings, dramas, literature, and music. From there, the book turns to an analysis and commentary on specific works of art within the visual arts, li...

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jaco...

A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: D...

100 Ways To Love Your Wife is filled with practical ideas for pursuing love, kindness, friendship, and appreciation in the everyday lives of couples committed to enjoying the best a great marriage has to offer (although much of what's here is apropos for those planning to be married, too!). What does it take to have a great marriage? It's not all that complicated - just a whole lot of decisions that say, "I love you," rather than those that say, "I love me." This book provides suggestions ...

Between 2009 and 2014, as the nation contemplated the historic election of Barack Obama and endured the effects of the Great Recession, Matthew Frye Jacobson set out with a camera to explore and document what was discernible to the “historian’s eye” during this tumultuous period. Having collected several thousand images, Jacobson began to reflect on their raw, informal immediacy alongside the recognition that they comprised an archive of a moment with unquestionable historical significance...

One of three volumes responding to the 7 October attack, Antisemitic Discourse focuses on the ideology that motivated it and the antisemitism that shaped many responses to it.It examines the provenance of the Jew-hatred, from English history to Palestinian Islamism; from toxic 19th century ‘Jewish Question’ rhetoric to the perversion of the Trotskyist tradition that allowed parts of the left to embrace antisemitism. It includes Howard Jacobson’s lecture of 22 October on an...