Over the last half of the twentieth century, culture moved to the foreground of political and intellectual life. Suddenly everyone discovered that culture had been mass produced like Ford's cars; the masses had culture and culture had a mass. Culture was everywhere, no longer the property of the cultured or the cultivated. Radical social movements around the globe invented a politics of culture.

Culture In the Age of Three Worlds is a reflection on this cultural turn which was a fundamental aspect of the age of three worlds, that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when it was...

This title tracks the spy thriller from John Buchan to Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre, and shows how these tales of spies, moles, and the secret service tell a history of modern society, translating the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century into the intrigues of a shadow world of secret agents.

A radically new reading of the origins of recorded music
"Noise Uprising" brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the globe: among them Havana s son, Rio s samba, New...