Harvard University Press: 1090 books

An award-winning professor and an accomplished educator, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine take us beyond the hype of reform and inside some of America’s most innovative classrooms to show what is working—and what isn’t. In a world where test scores have been king, this boldly humanistic book offers a rich account of what education can be at its best.

Our legal system is committed to the idea that private markets and the law of contracts that supports them are the primary institutions for allocating goods and services in a modern economy. Yet the market paradigm, this book argues, leaves substantial room for challenge.

Like all cellular organisms humans run on electricity. Cells work like batteries: slight imbalances of electric charge across cell membranes, caused by ions moving in and out of cells, result in sensation, movement, awareness, and thinking—the things we associate with being alive. Robert Campenot offers an accessible overview of animal electricity.

In this classic work, Huntington challenges old assumptions and ideas on the role of the military in society. Stressing the value of the military outlook for American national policy, Huntington has performed the distinctive task of developing a general theory of civil–military relations and subjecting it to rigorous historical analysis.

Does the green movement remain a transformative force in American life? In Environment in the Balance Jonathan Cannon interprets a wide range of U.S. Supreme Court decisions over four decades and explores the current ferment among activists, to gauge the practical and cultural impact of environmentalism and its future prospects.

Roisin Cossar examines how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the Black Death. Despite reformers’ desire for clerics to remain celibate, clerical households resembled those of the laity, and priests’ lives included apprenticeships in youth, fatherhood in middle age, and reliance on their families in old age.

On May 10, 1900, an enthusiastic Brooklyn crowd bid farewell to the Quito. The ship sailed for famine-stricken Bombay, carrying both tangible relief—thousands of tons of corn and seeds—and “a tender message of love and sympathy from God’s children on this side of the globe to those on the...

Images of religious extremism and violence in Pakistan—and the narratives that interpret them—inform global events but also twist back to shape local class politics. Ammara Maqsood focuses on life in Lahore, where she untangles these narratives to show how central they are for understanding competition between middle-class groups.

"Abrahamic religions" has gained currency in scholarly and ecumenical circles as a way to refer to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Carol Bakhos steps back from the convention to ask: What is Abrahamic about these three faiths? She challenges references to Judaism and Islam as sibling religions and warns against uncritical adoption of the term.

A widely-accepted explanation for India’s national unity is a narrative called the bhakti movement—poet-saints singing bhakti from India’s southern tip to the Himalayas between 600 and 1600. John Hawley shows that this narrative, with its political overtones, was created by the early-twentieth-century circle around Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal.

Asia Inside Out reveals the dynamic forces that have linked regions of the world’s largest continent. Connected Places, the second of three volumes, highlights the flows of goods, ideas, and people across natural and political boundaries and illustrates the confluence of factors in the historical construction of place and space.

Exploring the morally entangled territory of language and race in 18th- and 19th-century America, Sean Harvey shows that whites’ theories of an “Indian mind” inexorably shaped by Indian languages played a crucial role in the subjugation of Native peoples and informed the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.

The father of Indian independence, Gandhi was also a political theorist who challenged mainstream ideas. Sovereignty, he said, depends on the consent of citizens willing to challenge the state nonviolently when it acts immorally. The culmination of the inner struggle to recognize one’s duty to act is the ultimate “Gandhian moment.”

Keith Tribe’s new translation presents Economy and Society as it stood when Max Weber died. One of the world’s leading experts on Weber’s thought, Tribe has produced a clear and faithful translation that will become the definitive English edition of one of the few indisputably great intellectual works of the past 150 years.