'Reading has a history. But how can we recover it?' This volume brings together original research essays focusing on the history of reading in the British Isles, using evidence ranging from library records to Mass Observation surveys to highlight the social factors that influence a seemingly private, individual activity.

The mysterious, highly influential hidden world of Yale’s secret societies is revealed in a definitive and scholarly history. Secret societies have fundamentally shaped America’s cultural and political landscapes. In ways that are expected but never explicit, the bonds made through the most elite of secret societies have won members Pulitzer Prizes, governorships, and even presidencies. At the apex of these institutions stands Yale University and its rumored twenty-six secret societies. Tracing a history that has intrigued and enthralled for centuries, alluring the attention of such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Skulls and Keys traces the history of Yale’s societies as they set the foundation for America’s future secret clubs and helped define the modern age of politics. But there is a progressive side to Yale’s secret societies that we rarely hear about, one that, in the cultural tumult of the nineteen-sixties, resulted in the election of people of color, women, and gay men, even in proportions beyond their percentages in the class. It’s a side that is often overlooked in favor of sensational legends of blood oaths and toe-curling conspiracies. Dave Richards, an alum of Yale, sheds some light on the lesser known stories of Yale’s secret societies. He takes us through the history from Phi Beta Kappa in the American Revolution (originally a social and drinking society) through Skull and Bones and its rivals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there have been articles and books on some of those societies, there has never been a scholarly history of the system as a whole.

Collects the private correspondence between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, revealing the ups and downs of their marriage, their thoughts on their work, and their friendships with other artists.

Between 1750 and 1920 over 15,000 people visited Antarctica. Despite such a large number the historiography has ignored all but a few celebrated explorers. Maddison presents a study of Antarctic exploration, telling the story of these forgotten facilitators, he argues that Antarctic exploration can be seen as an offshoot of European colonialism.

The essays in Sound Judgment span the full career of Richard Leppert, from his earliest to work that appears here for the first time, on subjects drawn from early modernity to the present concerning music both popular and classical, European and North American. Noted for his path-breaking interdisciplinary scholarship on music and visual culture, the collection includes key essays on music's visualization in art practices in virtually all visual media, including film. The fourteen essays comprising this volume demonstrate Leppert's many contributions to critical musicology, particularly in the areas of aesthetics as well as social and intellectual history, all of it grounded in a heterodox body of critical and cultural theory, with the work of Theodor W. Adorno particularly noteworthy. The collection is preceded by an introduction in which Leppert traces his intellectual development, defined in large part by the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s and their aftermath both in the academy and in society at large.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.