Jason D'Aquino is known for his meticulous, ultra-precise miniature drawings on matchbooks and other kinds of vintage paper. Here he enlists his super-sharp pencil in a slightly larger format: the alphabet book. Based on early 20th-century circus and carnival acts and personalities, these ABCs star an amazing assortment of arcane animals, madcap marvels, and marvelous men and women of the midway. A celebration of all those who venture beyond the mainstream, this exquisitely illustrated book offers a fascinating glimpse into a magical world of fantasy and illusion.

The professional career and success of Wilhelm Bode (1845-1929) relied on the business of connoisseurship. Like other contemporary art historians involved in the commerce of art, he was entangled in the reciprocal dynamics and interdependencies of the nascent discipline of art history, connoisseurship and the art trade. The volume introduces new material and a fresh perspective on Bode's strategic participation in the Western art market, exposing the particular consequences of these entanglements on the birth of the art historical canon and showcasing his complex agency within the art marketplace of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism redefines the potential of American antislavery literature as a cultural and political imaginary by situating antislavery literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighting the role of women as producers, subjects, and audiences of antislavery literature. Pia Wiegmink draws attention to locales, authors, and webs of entanglement between texts, ideas, and people. Perceived through the lens of gender and transnationalism, American antislavery literature emerges as a body of writing that presents profoundly reconfigured literary imaginations of freedom and equality in the United States prior to the Civil War.

Focusing on fine art and documentary photography, this book provides a diverse and inclusive version of photography history and its contemporary manifestations. Through 40 interviews with and profiles of photographers from underrepresented communities—those of African, Asian, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander and Aleutian heritage, and other indigenous communities—this collection turns on its head homogenous visual culture. Essential reading for photography students and practitioners, this book celebrates the diversity of the real world with fascinating accounts of artists and the broad range of their challenges and successes: aspirations, photo series and photobooks, earning a living, discrimination, photography education, photographic practice, technical conversations, and more.

From climate change forecasts and pandemic maps to Lego sets and Ancestry algorithms, models encompass our world and our lives. In her thought-provoking new book, Annabel Wharton begins with a definition drawn from the quantitative sciences and the philosophy of science but holds that history and critical cultural theory are essential to a fuller understanding of modeling. Considering changes in the medical body model and the architectural model, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, Wharton demonstrates the ways in which all models are historical and political. Examining how cadavers have been described, exhibited, and visually rendered, she highlights the historical dimension of the modified body and its depictions. Analyzing the varied reworkings of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem-including by monumental commanderies of the Knights Templar, Alberti's Rucellai Tomb in Florence, Franciscans' olive wood replicas, and video game renderings-she foregrounds the political force of architectural representations. And considering black boxes-instruments whose inputs we control and whose outputs we interpret, but whose inner workings are beyond our comprehension-she surveys the threats posed by such opaque computational models, warning of the dangers that models pose when humans lose control of the means by which they are generated and understood. Engaging and wide-ranging, Models and World Making conjures new ways of seeing and critically evaluating how we make and remake the world in which we live.