Identity History

In The Invisible History of the Human Race, Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be going. While some books explore our genetic inheritance and some popular television shows celebrate ancestry, this is the first book to explore how everything from DNA to emotions to names and the stories that form our lives are all part of our human legacy.

After victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatized country. Simon Winder, born into this nation of uncertain identity, fell in love (as many before and since) with the man created as the antidote, a quintessentially British figure of great cultural significance: James Bond. Written with passion, wit and a great deal of personal insight and affection, this book is his wildly amusing attempt to get to grips with Bond’s legacy and the difficult decades in which it really mattered.

This volume offers an accessible investigation of the Naassene discourse embedded in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies (completed about 222 CE), in order to understand the theology and ritual life of the Naassene Christian movement in the late second and early third centuries CE. The work provides basic data on the date, genre, and provenance of the Naassene discourse as summarized by the author of the Refutation (or Refutator).

An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.

An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity. When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.

We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.

The Balkan area has historically been one of the world’s most combustible regions. Home to several national groups and at a crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Balkans have exerted an outsized role on world affairs. Infamously, the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, was the final straw that led to World War I. The Balkans, however, had been flammable long before Princip’s bullets murdered the Austrian monarch-in-waiting.

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL - "in real life" - now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age. In The Secret Life, the essayist and novelist Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL.

With her father murdered and her home burned, lovely Alyx Blackelt fled to the woods - and sanctuary in the camp of Raine Montgomery, a nobleman outlawed by the king's edict. There she hid her beauty in the guise of a boy and her sorrow in her work as Montgomery's squire. But how long could such loveliness as hers be hidden? How long could such a gallant man's desires be blind?

No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply - some would say totally - involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today’s young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be “app-dependent” versus “app-enabled” and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era.

An investigation of how Moses was deceived and murdered by his father-in-law, Reuel: this audiobook shows how the magician Reuel staged the Burning Bush that spoke to Moses and assumed Moses’ identity after his murder; explains how early scribes edited the Exodus story to cover Moses’ assassination and replacement and fabricated Moses’ origin story; and builds upon the Moses research of Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, and Sigmund Freud - who spent the last 40 years of his life obsessed with solving Moses’ murder....

In Real Americans, Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American.

Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime—a biopic of aviation pioneer Jerrie Cobb, the key figure in a group of extraordinary women who in 1960 passed the same tests as the legendary male astronauts of the Mercury 7 but never went to space. Just as casting was set to begin, Haverstick received a mysterious warning from a government agent; soon she began to suspect that there was more to Jerrie’s story than what met the eye. As she dug deeper, she discovered that Jerrie’s life shadowed that of a mysterious CIA agent named June Cobb.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called Black to what is assumed to be White. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a "Black" father from the segregated South and a "White" mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of "Black blood" makes a person Black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations....

King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war - colonists against Indians - that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war". Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy now examines the relationship between the war's realities and myths and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy.

In White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina offers a landmark analysis of emerging patterns of white identity and collective political behavior, drawing on sweeping data. Where past research on whites' racial attitudes emphasized out-group hostility, Jardina brings into focus the significance of in-group identity and favoritism. Jardina shows that disaffected whites are not just found among the working class; they make up a broad proportion of the American public - with profound implications for political behavior and the future of racial conflict in America.

In American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell compares today’s secular politics of identity - skin tone, gender, and sexuality - to the religious awakenings of America’s past. The book asks where the clerisy of identity politics came from, how identity politics claimed a death grip on liberalism, and how can it be defeated.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

The destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and the Babylonian exile that followed, could have spelled the end of Israelite identity. But the return of exiles, first under Zerubbabel, and again under Ezra and Nehemiah a generation later, resurrected Isra-elite identity and opened a new chapter in the history of Israel.