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When it was founded in 1824, the Athenæum broke the mold. Unlike in other preeminent clubs, its members were chosen on the basis of their achievements rather than on their background or political affiliation. Public rather than private life dominated the agenda. The club, with its tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, has attracted leading scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout its history, including Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, Edward Burne-Jones and Yehudi Menuhin, Winston Churchill and Gore Vidal. This book is not presented in the traditional, insular style of club histories, but devotes attention to the influence of Athenians on the scientific, creative, and official life of the nation. From the unwitting recruitment of a Cold War spy to the welcome admittance of women, this lively and original account explores the corridors and characters of the club; its wider political, intellectual, and cultural influence; and its recent reinvention.

European forays to mountain summits began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the search for plants and minerals and the study of geology and glaciers. Yet scientists were soon captivated by the enterprise of climbing itself, enthralled with the views and the prospect of “conquering” alpine summits. Inspired by Romantic notions of nature, early mountaineers idealized their endeavors as sublime experiences, all the while deliberately measuring what they saw. As increased leisure time and advances in infrastructure and equipment opened up once formidable mountain regions to those seeking adventure and sport, new models of masculinity emerged that were fraught with tensions. This book examines how written and artistic depictions of nineteenth-century exploration and mountaineering in the Andes, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada shaped cultural understandings of nature and wilderness in the Anthropocene.

Ever since the age of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean has had a significant pull for Britons — including many painters and poets — who sought from it the inspiration, beauty, and fulfilment that evaded them at home. Referred to as ‘Magick Land’ by one traveller, dreams about the Mediterranean, and responses to it, went on to shape the culture of a nation. This book charts how a new sensibility arose from British engagement with the Mediterranean, ancient and modern. Ranging from Byron's poetry to Damien Hirst's installations, the book shows that while idealized visions and aspirations often met with disillusionment and frustration, the Mediterranean also offered a notably insular society the chance to enrich itself through an imagined world of colour, carnival, and sensual self-discovery.

From the Charge of the Light Brigade to Scott of the Antarctic and beyond, it seems as if glorious disaster and valiant defeat have been essential aspects of the British national character for the past two centuries. This book examines the evolution of British conceptions of heroism from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the prevalence of heroic failure in British culture. It argues that Britain's embrace of heroic failure initially helped to gloss over the moral ambiguities of imperial expansion. Later, it became a strategy for coming to terms with diminishment and loss. Filled with compelling, moving, and often humorous stories from history, the book offers a fresh way of thinking about the continuing legacy of empire in British culture today.

G.I. Messiahs examines soldier veneration in twentieth- and twenty-first century America and argues that soldiers are the theological center of American civil religion. This book also recognizes that soldiers engage with and are shaped by the symbols, rituals, and mythologies of American civil religion and are thus its most committed, consistent practitioners. G.I. Messiahs builds this argument by examining episodes from the long American century in which the nation has interpreted itself through the bodies, words, and deeds of soldiers and by describing and analyzing soldiers’ struggles with the burdens placed on them. The aim of this book is to redirect conversations about American civil religion toward consideration of its contours as a lived tradition focused on the service, suffering, and sacrifice of the American soldier.

This book chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany's most iconic cities in this history of Weimar. Weimar was a centre of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar's creative lights, transforming the one-time artists' utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. This book offers a complete history of Weimar, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, cultural, economic, and political changes, as well as increased geographic mobility, placed strains upon British society. But by cultivating friendships and alliances, women worked to socially cohere Britain and its colonies. Presenting an historical study of female friendship and alliance for the early modern period, this book draws on a series of interlocking microhistorical studies to demonstrate the vitality and importance of bonds formed between British women in the long eighteenth century. It shows that while these alliances were central to women's lives, they were also instrumental in building the British Atlantic world.

This book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the United States today. It begins with a look back at a 1925 case in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for misrepresentation of her race, and shows how our society has yet to come to terms with interracial marriage. The book examines this issue by drawing from a variety of sources, including personal experiences. It argues that housing law, family law, and employment law fail, in important ways, to protect multiracial couples. In a society in which marriage is used to give, withhold, and take away status—in the workplace and elsewhere—the book says interracial couples are at a disadvantage, which is only exacerbated by current law.

The world's population has grown by five billion people over the past century, an astounding 300 percent increase. Yet it is actually the decline in family size and population growth that is the issue attracting greatest concern in many countries. This book looks at demographic trends in Europe, North America, and Asia—areas that now have low fertility rates—and argues that there is an essential yet often neglected political dimension to a full assessment of these trends. Political decisions that promote or discourage marriage and childbearing, facilitate or discourage contraception and abortion, and stimulate or restrain immigration all have played significant roles in recent trends.

Celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, who studied sex in Samoa and child-rearing in New Guinea in the 1920s and 1930s, was determined to show that anthropology could tackle the psychology of the most complex, modern societies in ways useful for waging the Second World War. This book follows Mead and her closest collaborators—her lover and mentor Ruth Benedict, her third husband Gregory Bateson, and her prospective fourth husband Geoffrey Gorer—through their triumphant climax, when she became the cultural ambassador from America to Britain in 1943, to her downfall in the Cold War. Part intellectual biography, part cultural history, and part history of the human sciences, it is a reminder that the Second World War and the Cold War were a clash of cultures, not just ideologies, and asks how far intellectuals should involve themselves in politics, at a time when Mead's example is cited for and against experts' involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.