Understanding Society

In 2011 James Scott gave a pair of Tanner Lectures at Harvard. He had chosen a topic for which he felt he had a fairly good understandin...

Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History  is a fascinating counterpoint to Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since...

Image: Yellow River, Qing Dynasty Image: Free and Slave States, United States 1850 One approach to causal explanation involves see...

The new institutionalists have largely focused on the maintenance and evolution of major social and political institutions. So Kathleen Th...

Ian Morris has written a pair of books that are intended to contribute to a particularly important set of disagreements in comparative econo...

Victor Lieberman is probably the leading historian of Southeast Asia writing in English today. His primary focus is Burma, and throughout h...

Victor Lieberman uses the phrase, "strange parallels," as the title for his two-volume study of Southeast Asian history ( Strange ...

Social science methods and historical explanation seem to come together in several different ways; what can we say about the differences of ...

There is an old-fashioned and discredited theory that holds that there are only a small number of development trajectories. Crudely, Western...

How should the philosophy of history interact with the practice of working historians? The philosophy of history is challenged to discover ...