Harvard University Press: 1090 books

In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy. Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration:...

Groping around a familiar room in the dark, relearning to read after a brain injury, navigating a virtual landscape through an avatar: all are expressions of vicariance—when the brain substitutes one process or function for another. Alain Berthoz shows that this capacity allows humans to think creatively in an increasingly complex world.

Scientific and technological innovations are forcing the inadequacies of patent law into the spotlight. Robin Feldman explains why patents are causing so much trouble. She urges lawmakers to focus on crafting rules that anticipate future bargaining, not on the impossible task of assigning precise boundaries to rights when an invention is new.

A human rights lawyer travels to hot zones around the globe before and after 9/11 to document abuses by warlords, terrorists, and counterterrorism forces. John Sifton reminds us that human rights advocates can only shame the world into better behavior; to invoke rights is to invoke the force to uphold them, including the very violence they deplore.

At the height of its power around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers at home and abroad. Yet the story of the Company’s beginnings in the early seventeenth century has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra’s...

Consumers feel powerless in the face of big industry, and the dominant view of economic regulators agrees with them. Trumbull argues that this represents a misreading of the historical record and the core logic of interest representation. Weak interests, he reveals, quite often emerge the victors in policy battles, by forging unlikely alliances.

“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and...

In Germany the end of World War II calls forth images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. Drawing on diaries, photographs, essays, reports, fiction and film, Werner Sollors makes visceral the sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience of a defeated people--and the paradoxes of occupation.

In the early years of World War II, thousands of political refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique in the French Caribbean, en route to what they hoped would be safer shores in North, Central, and South America. While awaiting transfer from the colony, the exiles formed influential...

Discarding tidy abstractions about the conduct of war, Aaron Sheehan-Dean shows that the notoriously bloody US Civil War could have been much worse. Despite agonizing debates over Just War and careful differentiation among victims, Americans could not avoid living with the contradictions inherent in a conflict that was both violent and restrained.

August Weismann’s 1892 theory that inheritance is transmitted through eggs and sperm provided the biological mechanism for natural selection. In this full-length biography, Frederick Churchill situates Weismann in the swirling intellectual currents of his day and shows how his work paved the way for the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution.

In July 1964, after a decade of intense media focus on civil rights protest in the Jim Crow South, a riot in Harlem abruptly shifted attention to the urban crisis embroiling America's northern cities. On the Corner revisits the volatile moment when African American intellectuals were thrust into the...

Steven Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. He describes the challenges of adulthood today and puts them into perspective by exploring how past generations achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss.

Russians from all walks of life joyously celebrated the end of Nicholas II’s monarchy, but one year later, amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people.