Home, wrote Robert Frost, is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. And yet the idea of home has, in the modern world, become extremely problematic.

Robert Frost's words tellingly illustrate the centrality of home to the human experience, as an unconditional haven that one simply has, without having to earn.

Yet, we live at a time when the idea of home has become extremely problematic. Our homeless fill America's streets and shelters; the comfort of home is increasingly threatened by urban violence; and the world-wide plight of those exiled or fleeing from their homelands due to civil war, starvation, or political repression seems relentless.

The idea of home, bound as it is in family and in the roles of men and women, has a deep resonance that is not fully captured by its use as a social and political slogan. What is its history and ideology? What has it meant and how has its meaning changed? Home moves us perhaps most powerfully as absence or negation. Homelessness and exile are among the worst of conditions, bringing with them alienation, estrangement, and the feelings of greatest despair.

This volume, based on a multi-institutional collaboration between the New School for Social Research and five major New York City museums, and its resulting conference, convenes many of America's top scholarly minds to address historical and contemporary meanings of home. Among the issues specifically addressed are the artistic rendition of home in art and propaganda; literary meanings of home; exile through the ages; homelessness past; homelessness in Dickens; the homeless in New York City history; alienation and belonging; slavery and the femalediscovery of personal freedom; and, more generally, the home and family in historical perspective.

Contributing to the volume are Breyten Breytenbach, David Bromwich (Yale University), Sanford Budick (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Stanley Cavell (Harvard University), Mary Douglas, Tamara K. Hareven (University of Delaware), Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge University, Emeritus), John Hollander (Yale University), Kim Hopper (Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research), George Kateb (Princeton University), Alexander Keyssar (Duke University), Steven Marcus (Columbia University), Orlando Patterson (Harvard University), Joseph Rykwert (University of Pennsylvania), Simon Schama (Harvard University), Alan Trachtenberg (Yale University), and Gwendolyn Wright (Columbia University).

Indian writing in English is flourishing, but classical languages, such as Sanskrit, seem to find no takers anymore. While every Indian citizen has the right to vote during election time, Dalits have to often struggle for their rights and dignity, more than sixty years after untouchability was abolished. These issues and counter-issues, and more, are discussed in this anthology by some of the most informed and insightful commentators on India: Ajit Balakrishnan, Sheldon Pollock, Gopal Guru, Ranjani Mazumdar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, among others. Taken together, the essays in this volume illustrate why the country's achievements should be seen only in the context of its problems, in order to get a complete picture of contemporary India.

Home, wrote Robert Frost, is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. And yet the idea of home has, in the modern world, become extremely problematic.

Robert Frost's words tellingly illustrate the centrality of home to the human experience, as an unconditional haven that one simply has, without having to earn.

Yet, we live at a time when the idea of home has become extremely problematic. Our homeless fill America's streets and shelters; the comfort of home is increasingly threatened by urban violence; and the world-wide plight of those exiled or fleeing from their homelands due to civil war, starvation, or political repression seems relentless.

The idea of home, bound as it is in family and in the roles of men and women, has a deep resonance that is not fully captured by its use as a social and political slogan. What is its history and ideology? What has it meant and how has its meaning changed? Home moves us perhaps most powerfully as absence or negation. Homelessness and exile are among the worst of conditions, bringing with them alienation, estrangement, and the feelings of greatest despair.

This volume, based on a multi-institutional collaboration between the New School for Social Research and five major New York City museums, and its resulting conference, convenes many of America's top scholarly minds to address historical and contemporary meanings of home. Among the issues specifically addressed are the artistic rendition of home in art and propaganda; literary meanings of home; exile through the ages; homelessness past; homelessness in Dickens; the homeless in New York City history; alienation and belonging; slavery and the female discovery of personal freedom; and, more generally, the home and family in historical perspective.

Contributing to the volume are Breyten Breytenbach, David Bromwich (Yale University), Sanford Budick (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Stanley Cavell (Harvard University), Mary Douglas, Tamara K. Hareven (University of Delaware), Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge University, Emeritus), John Hollander (Yale University), Kim Hopper (Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research), George Kateb (Princeton University), Alexander Keyssar (Duke University), Steven Marcus (Columbia University), Orlando Patterson (Harvard University), Joseph Rykwert (University of Pennsylvania), Simon Schama (Harvard University), Alan Trachtenberg (Yale University), and Gwendolyn Wright (Columbia University).

Plague. The word itself is like a blow, connoting misery, miasma and death. Plague takes many forms: influenza, typhus, cholera, the Black Death, and, recently, AIDS. AIDS has reminded us that epidemic infectious disease is not simply a historical phenomenon--or one limited like famine to remote continents --and is a vivid and painful illustration of how epidemics take place at a number of levels --biological event, social perception, collective response, and, finally, the individual, the existential and the moral.

"In Time of Plague"examines the many ways in which catastrophic infectious and contagious diseases are both biologically and socially defined. In the politically charged age of AIDS, "In Time of Plague" analyzes what past epidemics tell us about this new, deadly virus: How has the definition of disease differed throughout history? How have new technologies and advances in epidemiology changed our perception and response to disease? When has quarantine been appropriate or effective? What norms should govern our thinking about responsibility, culpability, legality, and confidentiality? What does society owe the victims? What, in turn, are the responsibilities of the carrier population?

Featuring essays by such distinguished scholars as Lewis Thomas, Joshua Lederberg, Dorothy Nelkin, Sander Gilman, Barbara Guttmann Rosenkrantz, Baruch S. Blumberg, George Kateb, and David A. J. Richards, among others, from a wide range of disciplines, this work seeks to answer some of these pressing questions.

Throughout history and in all places, animals have been an essential part of human culture. They have been hunted and domesticated, studied and mythologized, feared and loved. Our complicated relationships with other animals have repeatedly found expression in art, literature, religion and science. In 1995, the New School for Social Research sponsored a conference to explore human/animal interactions. Published as a special issue of the journal Social Research (under the title In the Company of Animals), this collection is here presented in one volume.