Harvard University Press: 1090 books

Over the centuries Americans have turned to torture during moments of crisis, and have debated its legitimacy and efficacy in defense of law and order. Tracing these historical attempts to adapt torture to democratic values, Fitzhugh Brundage reveals the recurring struggle over what limits Americans are willing to impose on the power of the state.

Impulse explores what people do despite knowing better, along with snap decisions that occasionally enrich their lives. This eye-opening account looks at two kinds of thinking--one slow and reflective, the other fast but prone to error--and shows how our mental tracks switch from the first to the second, leading to impulsive behavior.

The cliché of the Ugly American—loud, vulgar, materialistic, chauvinistic—still expresses what people around the world dislike about their Yankee counterparts. Carrie Tirado Bramen recovers the history of a different national archetype—the nice American—which has been central to ideas of American identity since the nineteenth century.

The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart startled scientists by demonstrating that twins reared apart are as alike, across a number of personality traits and other measures, as those raised together, suggesting that genetic influence is pervasive. Segal offers an overview of the study’s scientific contributions and effect on public consciousness.

Headline-grabbing murders are not the only cases in which sanity has been disputed in the American courtroom. Susanna Blumenthal traces this litigation, revealing how ideas of human consciousness, agency, and responsibility have shaped American jurisprudence as judges struggled to reconcile Enlightenment rationality with new sciences of the mind.

Felicia Knaul, an economist who has lived and worked for two decades in Latin America on health and social development, documents the personal and professional sides of her breast cancer experience. Beauty without the Breast contrasts her difficult but inspiring journey with that of the majority of...

Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. The world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists call this epoch the Anthropocene, Age of Humans. The facts of the Anthropocene are scientific—emissions, pollens, extinctions—but its shape and meaning are questions for politics. Jedediah Purdy develops a politics for this post-natural world.

Scholars have long claimed that the Eastern Roman Empire, a Christian theocracy, bore little resemblance to ancient Rome. Here, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that it was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of, and sometimes by, Greek-speaking citizens who considered themselves fully Roman.

Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself Byzantine. While the identities of eastern minorities were clear, that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations. Anthony Kaldellis says it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.

John Compton shows how evangelicals, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century. Their early-1800s crusade to destroy property that made immorality possible challenged founding-era legal protections of slavery, lotteries, and liquor sales and opened the door to progressivism.

The 1977 blockbuster Amar Akbar Anthony about the heroics of three Bombay brothers separated in childhood became a classic of Hindi cinema and a touchstone of Indian popular culture. Beyond its comedy and camp is a potent vision of social harmony, but one that invites critique, as the authors show.

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data...

Gillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.

When the Army drafted Elvis in 1958, it set about transforming the King of Rock and Roll from a rebellious teen idol into a clean-cut GI trained for nuclear warfare. Brian Linn traces the origins, evolution, and ultimate failure of the army’s attempt to reinvent itself for the Atomic Age, and reveals the experiences of its forgotten soldiers.