The untold love story of a Roman couple destined to shape an empire—before history wrote their names.In the heart of ancient Rome, where marble statues guard their secrets and the Senate chambers echo with whispered plots, intrigue weaves through every corner. Kyra, a young medica, arrives in Rome for an arranged marriage to a man aligned with her father's enemy. Her journey leads her to the heart of a web of mystery and espionage, where shadows cling to every cobb...

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then on, they began publicly referring to one another as father and son within a couple years of meeting. In 1960, after nearly four decades together, and with Robert Allerton nearing ninety, they embarked on a daringly nonconformist move:...

In this age of nearly unprecedented partisan rancor, you’d be forgiven for thinking we could all do with a smaller daily dose of politics. In his provocative and sharp book, however, Ned O’Gorman argues just the opposite: Politics for Everybody contends that what we really need to do is engage more deeply with politics, rather than chuck the whole thing out the window. In calling for a purer, more humanistic relationship with politics—one that does justice to the virtues of open, ...

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II.Nurses represent the largest segment of the U.S. health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team. Dr. Nurse probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twenti...

The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television.The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female charact...

Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade?San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America’...

Read the news about America’s colleges and universities—rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators—and it’s clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it’s always been that way. And that’s exactly why it has become the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world. Detailing American higher education’s unusual struggle for survival in a free market th...

The familiar old world of classical music, with its wealthy donors and ornate concert halls, is changing. The patronage of a wealthy few is being replaced by that of corporations, leading to new unions of classical music and contemporary capitalism. In Composing Capital, Marianna Ritchey lays bare the appropriation of classical music by the current neoliberal regime, arguing that artists, critics, and institutions have aligned themselves—and, by extension, classical music itself—w...

In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slot...

A grieving half-dryad. A dead god’s power. A priest who wants the world to rot.The witch is dead. The Well of Darkness lies empty. Aliah Starbough should be at peace. Instead, she walks a dying grove every morning, certain that something is still wrong.She is right. The corruption did not vanish when the witch fell. It only changed hands, and it corrupts the Simmaron a little more each day. To stop it, Aliah must bring the darkness home to the Cavern of the...

A call for heroes. A forest in peril. A patroller forced to face his past.Jerrick Bur was once a proud member of the King’s Patrollers, but those days are behind him—until a desperate plea from an old friend draws him back into a world of danger. The Simmaron Forest is in turmoil. The Hall of the Wood, a sanctuary for the King’s elite scouts, has fallen silent, and dark forces are stirring within the woods.Haunted by a past he cannot escape, Jerrick must un...

A nuanced take on how carceral expansions are changing labor and social life.In Carceral Citizens, anthropologist Caroline M. Parker offers an ethnographic portrait of therapeutic communities in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Americas. As nonprofits nested within the carceral state, therapeutic communities serve as reeducation and recovery centers for the mostly male drug offenders who serve out their sentences engaged in manual labor and prayer. Th...