Product Description: What is culture and who has the authority to define it? If culture is comprised of hierarchies, who determines what their standards should be, and how? What are the stakes involved in conceiving some forms of culture as good and others as bad? These may sound like questions from late-twentieth-century American culture wars, but they were already in vigorous dispute a century ago...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave...read more