Hunch explores ten issues in geology and astronomy—among them what causes the heating of the sun’s surface and whether Palaeolithic people sailed across oceans—where the accepted scientific answers to these questions were challenged, and how following one’s intuition can often lead to great intellectual rewards.

Pepperpot City, a lavishly illustrated collection of seventeen thematic essays ranging from memoir to investigative history written by veteran food writer and Philadelphian William Woys Weaver, provides an engaging and accessible tour of Old Philadelphia cuisine as well as modernized re-creations of historical dishes, including pepperpot soup.

In Necessary Inventions, E. R. Truitt uses thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon—and his characterization as a prophetic figure of scientific modernity—to reveal the medieval thinking that enabled modern science to tell a story of scientific development that erased non-Christian texts, actors, and cultures from the history of science.

Rethinking the relationship of current literary criticism to the discipline’s past, Reading the Literary Past presents an interpretive approach to literary criticism grounded in critical histories rather than methods, attentive to the idiosyncrasy of reading and the contingencies influencing it.

Tacit Textuality is an ethnography about the practice of kombe in Zanzibar, in which Qurʾanic verses are liquefied and consumed as medicine across religious divides. Hanna Nieber investigates three foci: kombe’s materiality, its social context that includes interreligious relations, and how the materiality of the book becomes part of the story.

Using rarely studied financial records from the Inquisition’s archives, Ana María Silva Campo reveals how the Spanish Inquisition seized property from prosperous Black women and descendants of Portuguese Jews—a process of selective persecution and wealth redistribution that helped create racialized economic hierarchies in a Spanish colonial city.

Keeping Our Enemies Closer reveals what happens when college students, police, and community members talk across political lines. Based on in-depth research, it explores the promises and limits of dialogue in polarized times—offering a nuanced, powerful look at how real conversations can both challenge and change individuals and institutions.

An exploration of the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800 and 1930, The Attentive Ear probes the origins, key theories, and experimental trajectories of attentional discourses around the globe, demonstrating the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction.

The Fly Room tells the story of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan’s laboratory at Columbia University where he and his students, by experimenting with and breeding fruit flies, invented genetics, which would eventually lead to the refutation of the theory of eugenics and prove Darwin’s theory of evolution right.

Contested Currents presents a new perspective on the history of New England by following its many rivers—tracing how the changes Native Americans and European colonists made to rivers drove the dramatic environmental and social transformation of the region.