"An exhilarating journey through the subcultures, occupied squats, and late-night scenes in the anarchic first few years of Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Berlin Calling is a gripping account of the 1989 'peaceful revolution' in East Germany that upended communism and the tumultuous years of artistic ferment, political improvisation, and pirate utopias that followed. It's the story of a newly undivided Berlin when protest and punk rock, bohemia...

A history of Ireland from 1600 through 1972, examining its social, cultural, economic, and political factors.

Murder-a dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy. And a very strange obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves? Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of the modern era, murder entered the popular psyche, and...

"Breaks down the most commonly held misconceptions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their lives. "You Can Tell Just by Looking" unpacks enduring, popular, and deeply held myths about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, culture, and life in America. Some of these myths, such as "all religions condemn homosexuality," have been used to justify discrimination and oppression of LGBT people. Other myths, such as "LGBT...

"Dazzling essays on faith, family and being a Black woman in America that explore what we do with the legacies we inherit, the faith that shapes our responses, and how we rebuild our stories for those who come after us--from the author of the popular blog Black Coffee with White Friends. On her blog, Marcie Alvis-Walker creates spaces for conversations about cultural norms, race, faith, and womanhood that encourage readers to unburden themselves from...

This set of twenty-four lectures examines aspects of elite and popular culture in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, focusing on the way in which men and women seeking to explain, order, and escape the terrors of their lives embraced transcendental religious experiences, dreamed of and worked for the coming of the apocalypse, and seized on a widespread belief in witchcraft and Satanism.

Without any formal training in music composition, Irving Berlin took a knack for music and turned it into the most successful songwriting career in American history. Berlin was the first Tin Pan Alley songwriter to go uptown to Broadway with a complete musical score (Watch Your Step in 1914); he is the only songwriter to build a theater exclusively for his own work (The Music Box); and his name appears above the title of his Broadway shows and Hollywood...

A study of the spiritual provocations found in the work of Philip Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, this book charts the emergence of a new psychedelic worldview out of the American counterculture of the seventies. These three visionaries changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experience reality - but how did their own writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America during one...