"Only skin deep," "getting under one's skin," "the naked truth" metaphors about the skin pervade the language even as physical embellishments and alterations--tattoos, piercings, skin-lifts, liposuction, tanning, and more--proliferate in Western culture. Yet outside dermatology textbooks, the topic of skin has been largely ignored.

This important cultural study shows how our perception of skin has changed from the eighteenth century to the present. Claudia Benthien argues that despite medicine's having penetrated the bodily surface and exposed the interior of the body as never before,...

"Only skin deep," "getting under one's skin," "the naked truth" metaphors about the skin pervade the language even as physical embellishments and alterations--tattoos, piercings, skin-lifts, liposuction, tanning, and more--proliferate in Western culture. Yet outside dermatology textbooks, the topic of skin has been largely ignored.

This important cultural study shows how our perception of skin has changed from the eighteenth century to the present. Claudia Benthien argues that despite medicine's having penetrated the bodily surface and exposed the interior of the body as never before,...

Why do biblical themes continue to have such an impact on the popular imagination? Why do Mary-like mothers and Jesus-like sons play such a prominent role not only in the late Middle Ages and the Reformation but also in the Enlightenment; the nineteenth century, with its faith in science; and even our time, in such movies as The Terminator and the Star Wars saga--to the extent that we can count them among Western society's leading cultural archetypes? And what does the figure of the father-God reveal about the social and familial institutions of male-dominated society?

In...

The names of early Germanic warrior tribes and leaders resound in songs and legends; the real story of the part they played in reshaping the ancient world is no less gripping. Herwig Wolfram's panoramic history spans the great migrations of the Germanic peoples and the rise and fall of their kingdoms between the third and eighth centuries, as they invaded, settled in, and ultimately transformed the Roman Empire.
As Germanic military kings and their fighting bands created kingdoms, and won political and military recognition from imperial governments through alternating confrontation and...

This book is a comparative history of the development of ideas about nature, particularly of the importance of native nature in the Anglo settler countries of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It examines the development of natural history, settlers' adaptations to the end of expansion, scientists' shift from natural history to ecology, and the rise of environmentalism. Addressing not only scientific knowledge but also popular issues from hunting to landscape painting, this book explores the ways in which English-speaking settlers looked at nature in their new lands.

Politics and Guilt sheds new light on our understanding of the pervasive psychological and cultural effects of Nazism by examining the power of guilt in modern Germany. Usually seen as a psychological and intensely personal phenomenon, the effect of guilt on the collective arena of politics has been downplayed or misunderstood by many political scientists. Taking issue with Hannah Arendt, Daniel Goldhagen, and Hermann Lubbe, Gesine Schwan argues that Germans must confront their Nazi past because the repression or lack of acknowledgment of guilt damages modern democracies. The Nazi...