Focusing on clothing, bodily deportment, sex roles, sexual practices, and political rhetoric as forms of fashion, this work bounds across two thousand years of history, showing how the evolution of fashion from an upper-class privilege into a vehicle of popular expression closely follows the rise of democratic values.

Seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. This book offers an empirical case study of how culture works in practice and how practice makes and remakes culture. It is of interest to students of cultural theory.

Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a matter of purely individual despair, but Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed that if anything can explain how individuals relate to society, then it is suicide. This work was the result of his research.

14 essays cover cities in United States, Canada, England, France, and Columbia. Contributors include Norman Birnbaum, Stuart Blumin, Michael Frisch, Clyde Griffen, Herbert Gutman, Michael Katz, Peter Knights, Lynn Lees, Anthony Maingot, Joan Scott, Leo Schnore.