University of Chicago Press

It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete...

A Great and Rising Nation illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations.Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage,...

Read the news about America’s colleges and universities—rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators—and it’s clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree...

What makes for a good life, or a beautiful one, or, perhaps most important, a meaningful one? Throughout history most of us have looked to our faith, our relationships, or our deeds for the answer. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May...

A data-rich examination of the US Supreme Court’s unprecedented detachment from the democratic processes that buttress its legitimacy.Today’s Supreme Court is unlike any other in American history. This is not just because of its jurisprudence but also...

Addiction is now seen as an ordinary feature of human nature, an idea that introduces new doubts about the meaning of our desires.Over the last forty years, a variety of developments in American science, politics, and culture have reimagined addiction...

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction—until America’s opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of patients.Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of...

Focusing on Chicago’s West Side, After Redlining illuminates how urban activists were able to change banks’ behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned.American banks, to their eternal discredit, long played a key role...

A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan...

America’s Philosopher examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history.The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of...

*PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST*A sweeping history of the inventors, inventions, and innovations that together created modern America.A stunning, wide-ranging history from one of the foremost historians of technology of our age, American Genesis tells the...

William Hagan’s classic American Indians has become standard reading in the field of Native American history. Daniel M. Cobb has taken over the task of updating and revising the material, allowing the book to respond to the times. Spanning the arrival...

First published in 1957, Nathan Glazer’s classic, historical study of Judaism in America has been described by the New York Times Book Review as “a remarkable story . . . told briefly and clearly by an objective historical mind, yet with a fine...

Few scenes capture the American experience so eloquently as that of a lonely train chugging across the vastness of the Great Plains or snaking through tortuous high mountain passes. Although this vision was eclipsed for a time by the rise of air...

Originally published in 1949, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning is widely acknowledged as a classic text. As its opening sentence states, “This is an attempt to describe generally the process of legal reasoning in the field of case law and in the...

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the...

A moving story of survival and an eye-opening introduction to an extraordinary community of chimps and people.Fongoli chimpanzees are unique for many reasons. Their female hunters are the only apes that regularly hunt with tools, seeking out tiny bush...

Offers a philosophical perspective on the nature and value of writing a memoir.Artful Truths offers a concise guide to the fundamental philosophical questions that arise when writing a literary work about your own life. Bringing a philosopher’s...

Offers insights into the social and cultural implications of humans’ relationships with rats and the natural world.Apart from the occasional pet owner who has rats, most people regard rats as disease-carrying nocturnal pests, scurrying around...

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel...

In 1949, a small book had a big impact on education. In just over one hundred pages, Ralph W. Tyler presented the concept that curriculum should be dynamic, a program under constant evaluation and revision. Curriculum had always been thought of as a...

Marijuana has come a long way since its seedy days in the back parking lots of our culture. So has Howard S. Becker, the eminent sociologist, jazz musician, expert on “deviant” culture, and founding NORML board member. When he published Becoming a...

An ideal entry point into health economics for everyone from aspiring economists to healthcare professionals.The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there’s little control over costs or services. Sometimes doctors are paid a lot;...