Harvard University Press Blog

Computerized Trading and “Internet Democracy”

In his 2009 book The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia argues against the still-common notion that internet access and rampant computerization will be inherently democratizing forces. Rather, he says, it’s just as likely that the undeniable empowering effects of computerization will serve to exacerbate imbalances of wealth and power. Or, as he summarizes the argument in a new essay on High-Frequency Trading: “it is probably correct that the rising tide of computerization does in fact lift all boats, and there is no reason to think that computerization comes along with some kind of built-in circuit breaker that prevents it from empowering the most powerful.”

Golumbia uses the rise of automated High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—drawing on real examples as well as its dramatization in the film Margin Call—to demonstrate the fallacy of assumptions about “internet democracy.” Web-based tools for automated financial trading are said to have leveled the playing field, allowing individual investors the same access to the markets that the high-powered brokerages and banks have long enjoyed. Just as critical as the ability to trade has been access to requisite information like real-time prices, trading volume, etc. And yet, these same seemingly-democratizing developments (automated trading, freely available information) are also what have allowed the market to become dominated by the algorithmic designs of the world’s top engineers, in the employ of its most highly-capitalized banks.

So, just as computerization lowers the barriers to entry in market trading, it underwrites a transformation of financial mechanisms on a scale such that the newly-welcome individuals haven’t a chance of keeping up. Just because all boats are higher doesn’t mean the smallest won’t still drown in the wake of the large.

The abstract of Golumbia’s article, forthcoming in Social Semiotics:

The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control. Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.

At Golumbia’s website you can also read a pre-press version of the full paper.

From British Infrastructure to Net Neutrality

Most of us living in 21st century industrial societies take for granted that our towns and cities are connected by a sprawling network of roads, most of which are reasonably well maintained. But, of course, it wasn’t always thus. In Roads to Power, a book we published a bit earlier this year, Jo Guldi explains when, how, and why Britain invented the system of infrastructure that now crisscrosses modern lands.

In a recent interview with CBC’s Spark, conducted during the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Guldi explained how British infrastructure came to be transformed:

Around 1780 a group of Scottish and Irish landlords started to think hard about what they were reading in this new economist, Adam Smith. And what they realized was that a system of infrastructure on a national level could break down local monopolies, and it could mean that they too could participate in the wealth of the industrial revolution being then experienced in England. And so they set about trying to persuade Parliament to give them sufficient cash to build roads out – an inter-kingdom highway system connecting London with her former colonial capitals of Dublin and Edinburgh. They were successful, and the inter-kingdom highway system was built over the course of thirty years. Thousands of miles of perfectly paved roads: the first expert-built infrastructure system of its kind in the world. Infrastructure on a national scale, connecting all sorts of grids of streets on the local and national level.

It was utopian thinking in 1780. Nobody had ever come up with such an idea. It was a new idea about how capitalism could work, if capitalism were going to defuse the wealth from the few guilds and few metropolises where people were enjoying the industrial revolution to everyone. So, a new idea of capitalism that worked for everybody.

As Guldi explains in the book, the development of this national road system had profound and unexpected ramifications. When travel by road became less challenging, more people became mobile. This led to new groups of people coming into contact, more people from more places roaming the streets of London, and new ways of thinking about the meaning of crowds and about how to interact in a vast world of strangers. Groups realized that they could use the roads to launch political movements or to manage their organizations, with soldiers, Methodists, artisans, theatrical players, and ordinary working people traveling in greater and greater numbers.

The Essence of the Literary Experience?

Earlier this month, The New York Review of Books Blog featured a piece from Tim Parks called “E-books Can’t Burn,” which has since been much tweeted, facebooked, and otherwise shared. It’s a solid, considered defense of the e-book, one that rehearses all of the practical advantages of digital reading (portability, one-handed reading, resizable type, etc), and kindly but firmly dismisses the materiality that people are reluctant to leave behind (the feel of paper, the scribbling of marginalia, the books on our shelves). In his repudiation of the notion that there’s much lost with the transition to e-books, Parks writes directly against those “literary men and women” who are most loathe to see such change.

He notes that e-books are one more stage in the evolution of the material experience of reading:

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

More than just a defense, though, Parks actually argues for the superiority of the experience of literary reading done digitally:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Fetish-free direct engagement with the essence of the literary experience certainly sounds like a great thing. But this nearly-utopian vision overlooks quite a bit of the actual experience of e-reading. The very advantages provided by the e-book surely undercut its ability to fuse us directly with the text: We can read e-books with one hand while the other clutches a strap on a crowded, racing train; We can read e-books on our phones, with calls and text messages breaking in at their whimsy; We can read them on our tablets, where the internet just dares us to call it extraneous; We can read them on our Kindles, with advertisements and crowd-sourced annotations.

We’ll leave aside all the very real concerns about what happens to the quality of the literary experience when we’re all trained to expect books for $9.99 or less, and won’t do much beyond chuckle at the suggestion that our engagement with gadgets (gadgets!) could ever not carry fetishistic gratification. Because we’re not e-book haters, honestly. Some of our best friends are e-books.

But, despite his nods to reading as an evolving experience, what Parks has written feels a bit too much like a declaration of the end of (book) history. It’s a celebration of an apparently friction-free medium whose mediation we can’t yet actually claim to understand. The study of the history of the physical book should make this clear. It’s a discipline that didn’t even exist until recently (the scholar Peter D. McDonald suggests that 1982 perhaps marks its birth, noting the publication that year of Robert Darnton’s classic “What Is the History of Books?”). This field, which has seen so much incredible work in these three decades, surely teaches us that there is much to learn from studying the experience of reading, even if it took us centuries to take note. And the work of scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, who’s studying software’s impact on writing, should suggest that its impact on reading is similarly ripe for examination.

To be sure, this isn’t meant as another attack on e-books, nor a defense of print. But to suggest that we’ve come closer to “the essence of the literary experience” seems to take for granted that such a thing exists, when scholarship suggests that it doesn’t. Mediation is a wonderfully messy thing, even when it comes on sleek screens.

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?

Three Operations

On January 22nd, 1913, a Mary Agnes Turner was the first patient admitted to the newly completed Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. After the birth of her first child the veins in her legs had begun to swell, and long hours on her feet as a maid only made things worse. By 1913, at age 45, her varicose veins had become so bothersome that she sought help. Her doctors at the Brigham planned an operation to strip her varicose veins, still a new procedure at the time. Medical personnel attending to the operation were clad in the newly conceived cotton face mask. In a brand new wooden operating room Turner was rendered unconscious through the use of ether, dripped onto gauze across her face. Using the newly introduced razor-blade scalpel and techniques developed just a few years earlier, doctors stripped segments of the veins by running a cable down their lengths and removing them forcefully. Turner was stitched up with catgut and silk, and discharged after ten days of postoperative care.

By 1965 the Brigham had grown to 300 beds. A stocky, muscular, 68-year-old Joseph Costello was admitted to treat a dangerously widened aorta. Relatively few procedures had been performed in the new field of vascular reconstruction, but the risks of operating on Costello were considered overshadowed by the consequences of inaction. Radio-opaque dye was injected into his aorta and an X-ray taken at the exact right moment to produce an image of the arterial tree. Costello’s aorta was seen to contain an aneurysm the width of a fist. Costello was sedated and wheeled to the very room where Turner’s operation had occurred, now with tiled walls and linoleum floor. A catheter was run to his bladder, a tube to his nose, and various intravenous lines were set. An electric knife opened Costello’s abdomen, and the aneurysm was isolated, clamped, removed, and replaced by a synthetic woven tube graft. His abdominal wall was closed in layers, the five-hour procedure ended successfully, and Costello was discharged ten days later.

At the same hospital in 2007, Shirley Laverne sought treatment for morbid obesity, an emerging and rather unexpected health problem. At 37 Laverne weighed nearly 350 pounds. An obvious candidate for gastric bypass surgery, in which the size of the stomach is drastically reduced, she went through an extensive series of information sessions and consultations before the course was set. She then was evaluated by a psychiatrist, dietitian, cardiologist, and radiologist, along with her physician and surgeon. On operating day, in a pristine room on a stainless steel table custom-built for morbidly obese patients, Laverne was fitted with pneumatic boots that could be pulsed to prevent blood clotting. She was rendered unconscious nearly instantly, catheterized, tubed, intravenously lined, and connected to an automatic respiratory unit. The procedure was conducted via laparoscopy, the training-intensive, minimally invasive technique of inserting instruments through relatively small incisions rather than opening the entire operating field. Five incisions were made for implements and a camera, and the surgeon watched a feed from the camera on a television monitor. He used stapling devices to isolate a small gastric pouch, restored intestinal continuity, and closed the incisions. Blood loss was minimal, the postoperative course was smooth, and three years later Laverne weighed 140 pounds.

Fasting From Information

Jo Guldi, a historian at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of Roads to Power, is one of the most digitally adept scholars we’ve yet had the opportunity to work with here at HUP. In the piece below, posted to her blog earlier this summer, Guldi considers some of the implications of the constant streams of information in which we all wash. As she explains, not too long ago she experimented in shifting her relationship with that information. She moved away from the common approach of restricting intake and reacting immediately, and toward a practice of exposing herself to an ever-wider amount of information and giving it time to affect her thinking.

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“Fast from stories,” advise the Taoists. The practice switches off old narratives. It’s advice related to a meditation practice of following the breath, remaining attentive from moment to moment, opening to new information, and staying in a state of awareness without judgment.

In an age of information, reading is pulled between two poles: one, reading intensively in the same areas that always intrigue us, the other, skimming for something new, observing without analyzing. A narrowing of focus is the natural shape of attention in an age of overwhelm. Fandom, loyalty to a political issue, and “following” one’s social network all take this form. How often does someone in my twitter network voice a point of view with which I radically disagree? Not so often. How often do I click through to a story on a topic I’ve never read about before? Not so often. Luddites, lamenting the death of the newspaper or our retreat from the forest, draw the conclusion that we have lost both awareness and variety. However modern it is, this narrowing of focus is almost necessary as a means of siphoning the ocean of information around us into a digestible trickle.

What about stepping into the ocean of sound itself, merely tasting its swirling mists without judging them?

I live beside that sea of information and spend more time alone with it than perhaps anyone else I know. For the last three years I’ve had the extremely unusual position of being paid, to read books and to write books, with very little in the way of outside obligation. Maybe 1% of professional historians are full-time professional researchers. The freedom of that position makes way for a diversity of reading unusual even among full-time writers, journalists, and professors.

When I was first granted this freedom, I wrote publicly all the time. Almost daily, fits of attitude would make their way onto the internet: observations about the modern university, the modern church, the modern family, the phenomenon of chatroulette, infrastructure policy, the recipe I most liked, the book I’d just been reading. Nothing was too big or too small but for me to have an opinion about it.

For the last nine months of that time, I haven’t blogged. I’ve confined myself to 140-character observations on Twitter.

Culturomics, Close Reading, and Casaubon

The June 23rd issue of Nature magazine featured a profile of Erez Lieberman Aiden, described in the article as “molecular biologist, applied mathematician and, at 31 years old, the precocious doyen of the emerging field known as the digital humanities.” Among a pretty staggering laundry list of other achievements, Lieberman Aiden, along with his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Michel, is behind “culturomics,” a quantitative approach to analyzing culture.

Lieberman Aiden and Michel were granted access to the millions of books digitized by Google, and are using all of that data to “very, very not-carefully” read through a corpus said to represent 10% of all books ever published. They intend this method of analysis as a revolutionary complement to the traditional “close reading” approach of the humanities. The basis is frequency analysis: Lieberman Aiden and Michel argue that you can learn a great deal by tracking how frequently certain words or phrases have appeared at various points in history. Google’s popular and addictive n-gram viewer, a simple tool that allows anyone to graph the frequency of appearance of words or short phrases across Google’s digital corpus, was built to demonstrate the possibilities for culturomics.

As the Nature story indicates, many people in the humanities have some deep reservations about this new approach. Dan Cohen, director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and someone on the leading edge of innovation in the digital humanities, is quoted as calling the n-gram viewer a “gateway drug” for the digital humanities, which is surely meant as praise. But Cohen expresses anxiety over the attempt to do broad cultural analysis across a database that includes only published books. “I think saying all books equal the DNA of human experience — I think that’s a very dangerous parallel,” says Cohen. The article’s author draws out Cohen’s concerns: “How do you factor in the cultural contributions of furniture, or dance, or ticket stubs at a movie hall? What about all the books that were never published? Or the culture as experienced by the world's vast illiterate populations?”

Lieberman Aiden and Michel are careful to make clear that they value traditional approaches to the humanities, and that they’re not the bum-rushing reformers that much of the coverage of culturomics makes them out to be. In response to one historian/blogger’s take on the Nature article, Lieberman Aiden and Michel dismissed as a “straw-man” the repeated claim that the duo think their work should make any extant method of historical analysis redundant.  In the Nature article, Lieberman Aiden is quoted expressing a great deal of respect for traditional approaches to the humanities. “I think you should use the best methods available—and all of them,” he says. “And I think that includes carefully reading texts and trying to get behind what authors think.” The article’s author recounts an anecdote told by Lieberman Aiden one Friday night over Shabbat dinner:

He tells the story of Isaac Casaubon, a sixteenth-century Protestant scholar, who undermined the presumed Egyptian provenance of a set of religious texts by identifying a reference to a Greek play on words—something that could only have been written hundreds of years later. “That point is as objective an interpretive remark as any remark a scientist might make,” says Lieberman Aiden. “So the methods of humanists are very, very formidable. And I think the degree of insecurity they have over whether these methods are here to stay is not really befitting.”

Marie Antoinette and the Machines

Not so long ago, a short video of a truly uncanny dulcimer-playing wind-up automaton made for Marie Antoinette in 1784 appeared online. The queen was no stranger to extravagance, we know, but why this machine, this wonderful human-like machine, which must have taxed the greatest artisans and mechanics of her time? What was its appeal? We asked Minsoo Kang, author of the newly published Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Watch the video below, and then scroll down for Minsoo Kang’s response.

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This video shows a demonstration of a beautiful dulcimer-playing automaton that was made by Peter Kintzing and David Roentgen in 1784, which was presented to Queen Marie Antoinette in the following year and purchased by her for the French Academy of Sciences. The object was not a simple doll with a musical device inside it, but a fully articulate construct that actually played a miniature dulcimer by striking its metal strings with tiny hammers. The wondrous automaton was one of many such intricately and exquisitely designed machines that mimicked living creatures during what I have designated as the period of the European “automaton craze” which began in 1738-39 with the appearance of works of Vaucanson and ended at the closing of the century with the performances of the chess-playing Turk of Wolfgang von Kempelen, which was a false automaton.

My book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination looks at how intellectuals have utilized the self-moving, life-imitating machine as a symbol and a conceptual object from the time of ancient civilizations to the twentieth century. I look at the Enlightenment—when various notions of the human-being-as-machine and the machine-as-representation-of-the-human became ubiquitous in Western discourse—as the crucial period in the history of the automaton idea. For almost a century before the automaton craze, philosophers, scientists, and writers described the universe, the state, and the human body as machines, contributing to what the historian E. J. Dijksterhuis famously called the mechanization of the world picture. When later mechanics began to build and display actual automata with astoundingly complex mechanisms, they were seen as beautiful, wondrous, and rational representations of the entire worldview of the Enlightenment. It is for this reason that the automata were a success not just with everyday people who came to gape in awe at the wondrous machines but with intellectuals as well, as such luminaries as Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie, and Mercier commented on the objects as things eminently worthy of study (as reflected in the articles under “automaton” and “android” in the eighteenth-century Encylopédie).

Addressing the Internet's Dark Side

A central paradox of the Internet as we know it is that there’s no privacy unless you’re there to invade someone else’s. Indeed, while living our lives online has effectively signaled the end of privacy for people as subjects, it provides a veil of anonymity for anyone who wants to use it. The Internet lets people bully, badmouth, berate, and spread misinformation without having to show their faces or sign their names. The resulting effects of the Internet on speech, privacy, and reputation are the subjects of The Offensive Internet, a new collection of essays edited by Saul Levmore, William B. Graham Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

From the book’s introduction, written by Levmore and Nussbaum:

“The speed with which reputations can be made and altered is just one way in which the Internet has changed everything. It surely is the case that most of the changes are for the better but, sadly, the Internet is a curse when one is the subject of negative information, whether self-presented, and then indelible, or communicated by others. And yet the Internet has changed nothing, which is to say it has returned us to the world of the village.”

From there, Levmore and Nussbaum explore the similarities and critical differences between the small villages of times past and the “small village” created by the Internet. In either situation there is the sense that everyone knows everyone, that all information is public. The crucial difference, though, is that when one’s reputation was attacked or privacy invaded in a village, there was recourse. Everyone knew the identity of the speaker, and so could take their credibility into account. And so the subjects of slander in a village could challenge the speakers, or, as a very last resort in the case of a ruined reputation, simply leave the village. On the Internet, where rumors, gossip, and malicious speech can quickly gain momentum, there is little chance of challenging an unknown speaker, and the Internet is a village you can’t really leave.

The editors and contributors, a group that includes Daniel J. Solove, Cass R. Sustein, and Jeffrey R. Stone, among others, cover a lot of ground across the book’s thirteen essays, and not all of the writers agree on how anonymity on the Internet should be addressed. The organizing principle, though, is that we should no longer allow the Internet to be an untouchable forum for the sort of offensive speech that would be legally actionable in any other venue. As contributor Brian Leiter explains on his blog, the general theme of the book is that “ordinary tort law, whose constitutional status isn't in doubt, should apply in cyberspace. Current law, remarkably, exempts cyberspace from large parts of tort law (but not from copyright law, oddly).”

Again from Levmore and Nussbaum’s introduction:

Reading in the Year of the Device

Unless the professional soothsayers, the book industry navel-gazers, and the technological evangelists have all been proven wrong (impossible!), lots and lots of you are ringing in 2011 with the brand new ereaders that you received as gifts last month. A Kindle? A nook? An iPad? A smartphone? One of each? Lucky!

Whatever you got, if you’re planning to use it for ebooks, we have you covered. Not every Harvard University Press title is available as an ebook, but quite a lot of them are, with more and more added nearly every day. Below is just a very short list of HUP titles that are currently available as ebooks from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the Google eBookstore (which, by the way, lets you finally buy ebooks directly from some of your favorite independent booksellers – check here for a list of participating indies).

This (again, very short) list contains recent releases, backlist treasures, perennial course adoption titles, and some of this blogger’s personal favorites. A word of warning, though: some of the ebook vendor sites aren’t yet so good at handling searches (Google is maybe being ironic?), so try including both the author and the title in your search terms if you have trouble finding any of these ebooks.

In no particular order:

Stealing Lincoln's Body, Thomas J. Craughwell

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Venkatesh

Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz

China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Minxin Pei

Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, David Tyack

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, Bethany Moreton

The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael J. Sandel

Inside Deaf Culture, Carol A. Padden and Tom Humphries

Why People Die By Suicide, Thomas Joiner

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova

The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots, Irene Maxine Pepperberg

White Teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, Richard A. Posner

Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Stephanie E. Smallwood

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, Michael A. Lerner

Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Marjorie Shostak

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence Levine

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Stephen Mihm

The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, Thomas Borstelmann

The New Gay Teenager, Ritch C. Savin-Williams

Biophilia, E. O. Wilson 

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, Tommie Shelby

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America, James M. O'Toole

Worst-Case Scenarios, Cass R. Sunstein

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, John Rawls

That should be good to get you started.  Happy New Device!