The "German question" haunts the modern world: How could so civilized a nation be responsible for the greatest horror in Western history? In this unusual fusion of personal memoir and history, the celebrated scholar Fritz Stern refracts the question through the prism of his own life. Born in the Weimar Republic, exposed to five years of National Socialism before being forced into exile in 1938 in America, he became a world-renowned historian whose...

Historian Joan Severance returns to the Sicily of her childhood, ostensibly to do research in the archives of the remote fortress town of Valparuta. In truth, her academic career lies in ruins behind her; she has been relieved of her teaching duties at Brown University after assaulting a student. Unable to approach her own long-buried history of loss and displacement, Joan takes refuge in the cool library rooms and the crumbling probate lists from...

Disenchanted and bitterly resentful, the historian Dr. Dallow has been released after 21 months in prison for playing piano in a subversive student cabaret. He refuses the Stasi's offer to help him get his university position back in exchange for becoming an informant. He lives in increasing isolation and despair as he tries to deal with the hypocritical social system and the injustice done to him. Things change after Soviet tanks roll into Prague...

Escaping from the press to Scotland, actress Emma McDaniel spends her time with brooding historian Dr. Jared Butler when she decides to research the legendary Lady Aislinn, a partnership that leads to the role of a lifetime.

Vincent Scully is likely the best-known living art historian in the United States today. Until recently, he was still teaching at his alma mater, Yale University, where a wide variety of students were drawn to his undergraduate history of art and architecture courses. For years, Scully's deep engagement with the subject and his passionate presentation style have inspired his students to value these subjects. Many of them have gone on to become prominent...

An aging art scholar and a visiting student, haunting echoes of France's colonialist past, and a delicious navarin of lamb--Bruno is back, and his latest case leads him from the Renaissance to the French Resistance and beyond by way of a corpse at the bottom of a well. When Claudia, a young American, turns up dead in the courtyard of an ancient castle in Bruno's jurisdiction, her death is assumed to be an accident related to opioid use. But her doctor...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: A bitter young man searches for the truth about his father's death and discovers the power of history in shaping our lives Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington returns to his hometown of Chaneysville, Pennsylvania-just north of the Mason-Dixon Line-to learn more about the death of his father. Washington discovers that his father was researching a mystery of his own: why thirteen escaped slaves...

"In an age in which the lack of independent public intellectuals has often been sorely lamented, the historian Tony Judt played a rare and valuable role, bringing together history and current events, Europe and America, what was and what is with what should be. In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last fifteen...

"Jane O. Newman, Co-Winner of the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, Modern Language Association" James I. Porter is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Important essays from one of the giants of literary...