The Masculine Mystique, the second volume of Marilyn French's monumental, readable, and unprecedented history of women, analyzes and evaluates the lives of women in societies around the world between feudal times and the French Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen years of collaboration with a team of researchers and prominent historians, the volume opens with fascinating chapters comparing medieval Europe and Japan, disparate cultures which nevertheless...

Writing about what she calls the "most cheering period in female history," Marilyn French recounts how nineteenth-century women living under imperialism, industrialization, and capitalism nonetheless organized for their own education, a more equitable wage, and the vote. Focusing on the United States, Great Britain, and countries in Africa, French argues that capitalism's success depended on the exploitation and enslavement of huge numbers, including...

Tracing the history of photography from its origins in the 1800s to the digital age, "Photography: The Definitive Visual History" is the only book of its kind to give a comprehensive account of the people, the photographs, and the technologies that have shaped the history of photography. From the first black-and-white photography to photojournalism and contemporary street photography, "Photography" celebrates the most iconic photographs and profiles...

Once upon a time, science fiction was only in the future. It was the stuff of drive-ins and cheap double-bills. Then, with the ever-increasing rush of new, society-altering technologies, science fiction pushed its way to the present, and it busted out of the genre ghetto of science fiction and barged its way into the mainstream. What used to be mere fantasy (Trips to the moon? Wristwatch radios? Supercomputers capable of learning?) are now everyday...