Books Received

Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. 300p., index, $16.95. The interdependence of nations even as they assert political separation from each other, with fourteen documents from Bentham’s review of Jefferson’s Declaration to the Declarations of Venezuela, Texas, Vietnam, and Rhodesia.

Bailey, Jeremy D. Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. xvi, 280p., index. $80. Analysis of Jefferson’s conception of the American presidency.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2008. ix, 426p., ill., index, $18.95. Forty-five short essays on painting, graphics, photography, film, and the publishing industry.

Besançon, Alain. The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. viii, 423p., bibl., ill., index, $35. Mondrian, Kandinski, Malevich, and European Romanticism in the context of Western representations of the divine.

Birla, Ritu. Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2009. xi, 346p., bibl., index, $23.95. Postcolonial reading of family firms and colonial commercial law in a nonwestern capitalism, 1870–1930.

Black, Jeff. J. S. Rousseau’s Critique of Science: A Commentary on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2008. xi, 316p., bibl., index. A close reading in terms of rhetoric, corruption, history, ignorance, science, vanity, and conscience.

Blackwell, Richard J. Behind the Scenes at Galileo’s Trial: Including the First English Translation of Melchior Inchofer’s Tractatus syllepticus. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 2009. xiii, 245p., bibl., index. Procedural maneuverings within the Roman Inquisition, with translations of five documents relating to the trial.

Bleichmar, Daniela, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP, 2009. xxiii, 423p., ill., index. Fifteen essays on practices of voyaging, cosmography, natural history, and exchange in the old and new worlds.

Blix, Göran. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. vii, 310p., bibl., ill., index, $59.95. Antiquarianism, erudition, the arts, and material culture, chiefly 1830s to 1860s.

Bono, James J., Tim Dean, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, eds. A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. viii, 273p., index, $24. Twelve essays explore threats to the humanities disciplines by new technology, a shrinking job market and declining funding, and the rise of interdisciplinary “studies” programs.

Bordogna, Francesca. William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. x, 382p., bibl., ill., index, $39. An interdisciplinary “science of man” as an attempt to redefine American academic culture and society.

Bowden, Brett. The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. xi, 303p., bibl., index, $45. International relations and the attempt to inculcate “civilization” in all corners of the globe.

Brague, Rémi. The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. xi, 287p., index, $35. Variant interpretations of Greek sources in the Mediterranean’s three monotheisms.

Breckman, Warren, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman, eds. The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory: Essays in Honor of Martin Jay. New York: Berghahn, 2009. xxxix, 419p., bibl., ill., index, $120. Eighteen essays on the arts, public memory, and the political Left in the twentieth century.

Brisson, Luc. How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology. Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. xiv, 206p., index, $19. The preservation of Mycenean myths in oral tradition, philosophical interpretation and their reception in the Renaissance.

Bronk, Richard. The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009. xviii, 382p., bibl., index, $27.99. Lessons from the nineteenth century.

Burguière, André. The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2009. xiv, 309p., bibl., index...