The Rise of the Imperial Self establishes a geneaology of aristocracy and places America firmly within an aristocratic tradition originally articulated by St. Augustine, but adapted to American society by Alexis de Tocqueville. Ronald W. Dworkin then traces the evolution of American culture from Tocqueville's America, when American aristocracy was defined by a love of something beyond the self to today's preoccupation with individuality, self-expression, autonomy, and self-esteem--the "imperial self."

At the heart of our ongoing interest in Walker, says Harrison, is the need to understand the ever-shifting ambitions and arguments that have driven American economic, military, and paramilitary ventures around the globe for the past 150 years.".

From the author of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

This book gives a radically new reading of Russia’s culturalhistory. Alexander Etkind traces how the Russian Empire conqueredforeign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, therebycolonizing many peoples, Russians included. This vision ofcolonization as simultaneously internal and external, colonizingone’s own people as well as others, is crucial for scholarsof empire, colonialism and globalization. Starting with the fur trade, which shaped its enormous territory,and ending with Russia’s collapse in 1917, Etkind exploresserfdom, the peasant commune, and other institutions of internalcolonization. His account brings out the formative role of foreigncolonies in Russia, the self-colonizing discourse of Russianclassical historiography, and the revolutionary leaders’illusory hopes for an alliance with the exotic, pacifistsectarians. Transcending the boundaries between history andliterature, Etkind examines striking writings about Russia’simperial experience, from Defoe to Tolstoy and from Gogol toConrad. This path-breaking book blends together historical, theoretical andliterary analysis in a highly original way. It will be essentialreading for students of Russian history and literature and foranyone interested in the literary and cultural aspects ofcolonization and its aftermath.

A remarkable re-creation of the life of K'ang-hsi, emperor of the Manchu dynasty from 1661-1772, assembled from documents that survived his reign. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho delivers a riveting, tour-de-force sequel to Less Than Zero, set on the seedy side of Los Angeles. • "A haunting vision of disillusionment, twenty-first-century style" (People). Returning to Los Angeles from New York, Clay, now a successful screenwriter, is casting his new movie. Soon he is running with his old circle of friends through L.A.’s seedy side. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, is married to Trent, a bisexual philanderer and influential manager. Then there's Julian, a recovering addict, and Rip, a former dealer. Then when Clay meets a gorgeous young actress who will stop at nothing to be in his movie, his own dark past begins to shine through, and he has no choice but to dive into the recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.