Based on a series of interviews, Leviatin presents the experiences of several generations of students and faculty members who studied and taught on the English Department of the oldest university in Central Europe, Charles University. The English Department is best known as the home of the Prague Linguistic Circle. By focusing on the university, and especially the English Department, Leviatin provides a detailed picture of the ways in which an institution and a community have been affected by war, occupation, ideology, and revolution. As the first book to provide detailed oral histories of the rise and fall of Czechoslovakian communism, it will be of interest to students of contemporary Eastern European social and political history.

Jacob Riis's famed 1890 photo-text addressed the problems of tenement housing, immigration, and urban life and work at the beginning of the Progressive era. David Leviatin edited this complete edition of "How the Other Half Lives" to be as faithful to Riis's original text and photography as possible. Uncropped prints of Riis's original photographs replace the faded halftones and drawings from photographs that were included in the 1890 edition. Related documents added to the second edition include a stenographic report of one of Riis's lantern-slide lectures that demonstrates Riis's melodramatic techniques and the reaction of his audience, and five drawings that reveal the subtle but important ways Riis's photographs were edited when they were reinterpreted as illustrations in the 1890 edition. The book's provocative introduction now addresses Riis's ethnic and racial stereotyping and includes a map of New York's Lower East Side in the 1890s. A new list of illustrations and expanded chronology, questions for consideration, and selected bibliography provide additional support.