HEB's Top Ten Titles for July 2015-December 2015

Twice a year, HEB publishes a list of our ten most-accessed titles. We’ve seen certain books become regulars on the HEB “bestseller” list, and newcomers to the list have alerted us to emerging trends in scholarly research.

For the second half of 2015, two titles make their top-ten debut. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History details an eighteenth-century workers’ protest and is inspired by the work of Darnton's colleague, Clifford Geertz, who wrote one of our perennial bestsellers. The other new addition for this six-month period is Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, by Gail Bederman. By focusing on four prominent Americans of the time, Bederman explores notions of masculinity in flux at the turn of the century. The popularity of this work underscores a growing interest in the study of gender and race, as has been demonstrated by many other titles on our lists.

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
3. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
4. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
5. Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991)
6. Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999)
7. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
8. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984) 
9. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1995)
10. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994)