Published: ‘s-Gravenhage, Netherlands, 1957 If a reader should take away a single sentence from this unassuming paperback publication, let it be this one: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Most of us will agree that this sentence is grammatically correct. Semantically speaking, on the other hand, it makes no sense at all. Armed with this example, Noam Chomsky undermined the prevailing linguistic models of the day, sending shockwaves through academia and altering the linguistic landscape forever. Like Newton’s Principia and Marx’s Das Kapital, this slim volume precipitated nothing short of a revolution in its field.  With Syntactic Structures, Chomsky – now […]

Published: New York, 1956 On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I – the event that would jumpstart the Space Race. Only a month later, on November 3, the Soviets launched Sputnik II, this time with a dog on board. Frontier to Space, a look at high-altitude rocket research in the United States, was published in the year prior to these game-changing events. In the book’s final chapter, Eric Burgess touches on projected developments: It has been postulated that artificial satellites of this planet could be established and diverse proposals have been put […]

Published: Paris, 1955 Written more than a decade after Claude Lévi-Strauss completed his few years of fieldwork in the Mato Grosso and Amazonian regions of Brazil, Tristes Tropiques is more a memoir than a systematic ethnographical study. In it Lévi-Strauss poetically recounts his observations about the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples of Brazil. He also invites his readers to join him in India and Pakistan and then, somewhat tangentially, to accompany him during his escape from France to Martinique and then to New York City, as France fell to the Nazis. Of particular interest to us at this moment […]

Published: Cambridge, Mass., ca. 1954 Today’s “150 Years in the Stacks” entry will appear for the first time on April 10, the precise date on which, 150 years ago, MIT officially came into existence. It was on April 10, 1861, that Massachusetts Governor John Andrew signed “An Act to incorporate the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” In recognition of that event, today’s selection is an MIT in-house publication. The Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories was printed to raise funds for the construction of two important facilities: MIT’s nuclear reactor, and the structure that came to be known affectionately – in the magical […]

Published: Paris and New York, 1953 The Paris Review is justly famous for its impressive list of founding editors and advisors (George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Donald Hall, Archibald MacLeish, et al.) as well as for the galaxy of writers whose work has appeared in its pages. In its first year alone, the journal featured material by Adrienne Rich, Donald Windham, Richard Wilbur, Simone Weil, Terry Southern, and other luminaries. During its second year, the Review would publish one of the first works in English by Samuel Beckett. The editors opened their series on “The Art of Fiction” in their very […]

Published: New York, 1952 Hailed by many as the father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson here presents the culmination of twenty-five years of work.  By this point in his life, Cartier-Bresson had shared New York gallery space with Walker Evans; had escaped from a Nazi POW camp on his third attempt, after nearly three years of forced labor; and had co-founded Magnum Photos, an international photo cooperative that remains in operation today (one of his co-founders was Robert Capa, who was featured in our posting for 1938). Previously a painter, Cartier-Bresson describes the interlude when he came to photography, which […]

Published: Princeton, N.J., 1951 Over the past 60 years, game theory has been one of the most influential theories in the social sciences, pervasive in economics, political science, business administration, and military strategy – the disciplines most consulted by the powers-that-be for “real-world,” high-stakes decisions. But just as there would be no semiconductors or (God forbid) laser pointers if not for the abstruse mathematics of quantum theory, game theory can be traced back to theoretical work by academic mathematicians. In a set of papers in the 1950s, mathematician John Forbes Nash set forth breakthrough ideas that helped transform game theory […]