This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

In this compilation of essays written over a fifteen-year period, the distinguished anthropologist explains his view of culture and its symbolic dimensions

In his best-known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen appropriated Darwin's theory of evolution to analyze the modern industrial system.

At the end of the Reconstruction, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic depressions eroded Americans' conventional beliefs in individualism and a divinely ordained social system. In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe shows how, in subsequent years, during theProgressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Americans sought the organizing principles around which a new viable social order could be constructed in the modern world. This subtle and sophisticated study combines the virtues of historical narrative, sociological analysis, and social criticism.

An experienced reporter who has gained the trust of both sides of L.A.'s notorious gang wars offers an inside look at how children become murderers and why gangs replace families

Argues that Americans work more than they used to, and more than Europeans, due to the preference of employers for longer hours, fear of unemployment, the undervaluing of household work, and the desire for consumer goods

Looks at two centuries of American family life and shatters myths and misconceptions about the past

Chronicles the dedication and perseverance of fifth-grade teacher Chris Zajac of Holyoke, Massachusetts, in her effort to educate the economically and emotionally deprived urban children in her classroom

Presents an historical approach to the concept of play as a cultural phenomenon.

The nineteenth-century French master combined personal comment and detached analysis in this exploration of the aspects, stages, and varieties of love, particularly passionate, romantic, unrequited love, and the imagination's power to transfigure love's object and energies.