Yale University Press: 2009 books

This engaging book is a welcome guide to the most successful and loved ballets seen on the stage today. Dance writer and critic Zoe Anderson focuses on 140 ballets, a core international repertory that encompasses works from the ethereal world of romantic ballet to the edgy, muscular works of modern choreographers....

The inimitable Alan Bennett selects and comments upon six favorite poets and the pleasures of their works   In this candid, thoroughly engaging book, Alan Bennett creates a unique anthology of works by six well-loved poets. Freely admitting his own youthful bafflement with poetry, Bennett reassures...

“Emma Griffin gives a new and powerful voice to the men and women whose blood and sweat greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution” (Tim Hitchcock, author of Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London). This “provocative study” looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between...

A much-needed concise biography of America’s first president As editor of the award-winning Library of America collection of George Washington’s writings and a curator of the great man’s original papers, John Rhodehamel has established himself as an authority of our nation’s preeminent founding...

A “scrumptious little book” about the cultural and historical background of this humble and hearty treat (The New York Times). If smoked salmon and cream cheese bring only one thing to mind, you can count yourself among the world’s millions of bagel mavens. But few people are aware of...

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social...

The commonly held view of Albert Einstein is of an eccentric genius for whom the pursuit of science was everything. But in actuality, the brilliant innovator whose Theory of Relativity forever reshaped our understanding of time was a man of his times, always politically engaged and driven by strong moral...

Nineteenth-century Brazil’s constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financial markets needed to thrive. This study shows why...

This compelling new biography provides the most authoritative picture yet of King Stephen, whose reign (1135–1154), with its “nineteen long winters” of civil war, made his name synonymous with failed leadership. After years of work on the sources, Edmund King shows with rare clarity the strengths...

The powerful and innovative King Æthelstan reigned only briefly (924-939), yet his achievements during those eventful fifteen years changed the course of English history. He won spectacular military victories (most notably at Brunanburh), forged unprecedented political connections across Europe, and...

Frank Barlow's magisterial biography, first published in 1970 and now reissued with new material, rescues Edward the Confessor from contemporary myth and subsequent bogus scholarship. Disentangling verifiable fact from saintly legend, he vividly re-creates the final years of the Anglo-Danish monarchy...

This intriguing book tells the story of England’s great medieval Angevin dynasty in an entirely new way. Departing from the usual king-centric narrative, Richard Huscroft instead centers each of his chapters on the experiences of a particular man or woman who contributed to the broad sweep of events....

William II, better known as William Rufus, was the third son of William the Conqueror and England’s king for only 13 years (1087–1100) before he was mysteriously assassinated. In this vivid biography, here updated and reissued with a new preface, Frank Barlow reveals an unconventional, flamboyant...