It was fall and the late summer rains had produced an overly-abundant grape harvest. Such a large harvest was driving down grape prices but, since volumes were up, the grape producers would probably do well in the end. But what about the middlemen? Sophisticated growers were selling their grapes many months in advance into the futures market. With a decrease in prices at harvest time, grape brokers who bought grape futures at premium prices early in the summer would be selling at a tremend...

The first complete biography of an influential historian whose dramatic life intersected with many great events and thinkers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first complete biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963), an influential and controversial German-American intellectual whose colorful and dramatic life intersected with many of the great events and thinkers of his time. A medieval historian whose ideas exerted an influence far beyond his field, he is most ...

“[One] of his best.” —Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker“A masterpiece.” —Los Angeles TimesThe year is 1971, or perhaps 1972, in Salvador Allende’s Chile. Arturo B. is just one of a motley crew of young bohemians attending Juan Stein’s poetry workshop at the University of Concepción when a mysterious newcomer by the name of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle arrives. Though Alberto’s taciturn manner, patrician airs, and cold, distant poetry ...

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardcover volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, an...

Radiances gathers previously unpublished essays by one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century. Although best known for The King's Two Bodies (1957), Ernst Kantorowicz's scholarly expertise ranged from classical antiquity to early modernity and from political pageantry to numismatics. These essays traverse the breadth of his expertise, exploring "radiations" of the themes that were central to his published work: sovereignty, t...

Readers who miss the magisterial pronunciamentos of the late Max Lerner . . . will relish this collection of Lerner’s writings on a subject that preoccupied him.” -BooklistMax Lerner taught generations of Americans about their government. For almost half a century, the office of the presidency preoccupied his prodigious energies and unparalleled expertise. Lerner not only wrote about the men who inhabited the Oval Office during that time, he knew them per...

From one of the greatest French philosophers of the twentieth century comes a seminal study and critique of propaganda. Taking not only a psychological approach but a sociological approach as well, Jacques Ellul outlines the taxonomy for propaganda and, ultimately, it’s destructive nature towards democracy.Drawing from his own experiences fighting for the French resistance against the Vichy regime, Ellul offers a unique insight into the propaganda machine.