Modern

A symphony of contemporary New York through the magnificent words of its people—from the best-selling author of Londoners.

In the wake of his celebrated book Londoners, bestselling author Craig Taylor moved to New York and spent years meeting regularly with hundreds of New Yorkers as diverse as the city itself. New Yorkers features 75 of the most …

It is 1963, Jean-Yves Soucy is 18 and looking for a summer job. He dreams of being a fire warden scanning the boreal forest from a fire tower. But to his dismay he is sent to an equipment depot somewhere between Val-d’Or and Chibougamau in Northern Quebec. His disappointment vanishes when he learns that the depot is located near a Cree community …

In Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red, Stephen Velychenko traces the first expressions of national, anti-colonial Marxism to 1918 and the Russian Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine. Velychenko reviews the work of early twentieth-century Ukrainians who regarded Russian rule over their country as colonialism. He then discusses the rise of "nationa …

This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven.

Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public hous …

Following the end of the First World War, a new world order emerged from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It was an order riddled with contradictions and problems that were only finally resolved after the Second World War.

Beyond the Great War brings together a group of both well-established and younger historians who share a rejection of the do …

On the eve of the First World War, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the largest and most powerful socialist party in the world. German Social Democracy through British Eyes examines the SPD’s rise using British diplomatic reports from Saxony, the third-largest federal state in Imperial Germany and the cradle of the socialist movement …

The year 1983 began like any other year in Canada's West Coast province. Then suddenly everything changed. The newly elected provincial government announced an avalanche of far-right legislation that shocked the country. A resistance movement called Solidarity formed across British Columbia and there were massive street protests, occupations, plans …

The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”—today’s official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts shar …