This Week’s New Books

Crusade and Christendom
Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291


Edited by Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell

568 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus.

Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4478-6 | $75.00 | £49.00

A volume in the Middle Ages Series

Intended for the undergraduate yet also invaluable for teachers and scholars, this book illustrates how the crusade became crucial for defining and promoting the very concept and boundaries of Latin Christendom. It provides translations of and commentaries on key original sources and an up-to-date bibliography. Read more…

Tropical Whites
Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas


Catherine Cocks

284 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 color, 12 b/w illus.

Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4499-1 | $59.95 | £39.00

A volume in the Nature and Culture in America series

Tropical Whites explains how the tropical beach resort came to symbolize the iconic vacation landscape. Catherine Cocks argues that the tourism industry romanticized and commodified tropical nature in the global South, ultimately legitimizing cultural pluralism and concepts of modern identity. Read more…

Inventing the Egghead
Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture


Aaron Lecklider

296 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus.

Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4486-1 | $45.00 | £29.50

Throughout the twentieth century, popular songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels alternated between representing intelligence as empowering and as threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, Aaron Lecklider cracks open this paradox by examining representations of intelligence to reveal brainpower's stalwart appeal and influence. Read more…

An Age of Infidels
An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States


Eric R. Schlereth

312 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus.

Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4493-9 | $55.00 | £36.00

A volume in the Early American Studies series

Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflicts between deists and their opponents at the center of early American public life. This history recasts the origins of cultural politics in the United States by exploring how everyday Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty. Read more…