A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation.

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress.

Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum’s lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure.

Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the museum’s front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.

The Joint Arctic Weather Stations were five meteorological and scientific monitoring stations constructed at Resolute, Eureka, Mould Bay, Isachsen, and Alert with the cooperation of the Canadian Department of Transport's meteorological branch and the United States Weather Bureau. From 1947 to the early 1970s as few as four Canadians and four Americans worked and lived at each of the four satellite stations, observing and collecting scientific data.This is the first systematic account of the Joint Arctic Weather Stations, a project that profoundly shaped state activates and scientific inquiry in the Arctic Archipelago. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, unpublished personal memoirs, and interviews with former employees, The Joint Arctic Weather Stations analyzes the diplomatic, scientific, social, military, and environmental dimensions of the program alongside each station as a nexus of state planning and personal agency. Contrary to previous scholarship, The Joint Arctic Weather Stations reveals that Canadian officials sought-and achieved-a firm policy that afforded effective control of Canada's Arctic while enjoying the advantages of American contribution to the joint meteorological program. It explores the changing ways science was conducted over time and how the details of everyday life at remote stations, from the climate to leisure activities to debates over alcohol, hunting, and leadership, shaped the program's effectiveness. An exploration of the full duration of the Joint Arctic Weather Stations from high-level planning and diplomacy to personal interactions in the stations makes this book an essential exploration of collaborative polar science in the North American Arctic.

Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. Formulated as a question, the topic of the book is: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue duree of Albanian modernity? Drawing on material from the independent Albanian publisher, Pika pa siperfaqe ("Point without Surface"), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.

Covering the period from the Armistice to 1939, the book examines the experiences of Irish soldiers who had fought in the British army in the First World War on returning home to what became the Irish Free State. At the onset of the War, southern Irishmen volunteered in large numbers and marched off accompanied by cheering crowds and the promise of a hero's welcome home. In 1916, while its soldiers fought in the British army, Ireland witnessed an insurrection against British rule, the Easter Rising. Ireland's soldiers returned to a much-changed country, which no longer recognised their motives for fighting and which was at war with the country in whose army they had served. It has long been believed that the returning soldiers were subject to intimidation by the IRA, some killed as a retrospective punishment for their service with the imperial power, and that they formed a marginalised group in Irish society. Using new sources, this enlightening book argues otherwise and examines their successful integration into Irish society in the interwar years and the generous support given to them by the British Government. Far from being British loyalists, many served in the IRA and the Free State army, and became republican supporters.

Great American Diseases: Their Effects on the Course of North American History presents medical history as it pertains to the major infectious diseases of North America. The book is designed to provide an interesting and engaging introduction to microbiology, immunology and epidemiology. With the advent of COVID-19, this book will serve as a reference on the history of previous epidemics. The book presents pandemics in an easy-to-read volume and provides concise chapters on the history of a disease, progression of understanding on the pathogen (agent of the disease), and their social ramifications through the history of North America.