a World of Culture September

The year 1930 can be seen as the dawn of a period of darkness, the beginning of a decade that Auden would style "low, dishonest." That year was one of the most reflective moments in modernity. After the optimism of the nineteenth century, the West had stumbled into war in 1914. It managed to survive a conflagration, but it failed in the aftermath to create something valued.

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth.

Equal parts travelogue and pandemic guide, journalist Ethan Lou examines the societal effects of COVID-19 and takes us on a mesmerizing journey around a world that will never be the same.

A young man's quest to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote African village that pulsates with beauty and violence

Discover how humans created their world from the objects they left behind - from the US Constitution to the first iPhone - in DK's latest history book.