Harvard University Press: 1090 books

Shantytowns once occupied a central place in America’s urban landscape. Lisa Goff shows how these resourceful dwellings were not merely the byproducts of hardship but potent assertions of self-reliance. Their legacy is felt in sites of political activism, from campus shanties protesting apartheid to the tent cities of Occupy Wall Street.

Sebastian Rödl undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. This profound work revives the thought that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.

Marxism was the loser in the Cold War, but Oleg Kharkhordin is not surprised that liberal democracy failed to take root after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. He suggests that Russians find a path to freedom by looking to the classical tradition of republican self-government and civic engagement already familiar from their history and literature.

The Battle of Waterloo was just the beginning of a long transition to peace. Christine Haynes offers the first comprehensive history of the post-Napoleonic occupation of France. Transforming former European enemies into allies, the mission established Paris as a cosmopolitan capital and foreshadowed postwar reconstruction in the twentieth century.

Many legal theorists maintain that laws are effective because we internalize them, obeying even when not compelled to do so. In a comprehensive reassessment of the role of force in law, Frederick Schauer disagrees, demonstrating that coercion, more than internalized thinking and behaving, distinguishes law from society’s other rules.

Why do human beings find some tone combinations consonant and others dissonant? Why do we make music using only a small number of scales out the billions that are possible? Dale Purves shows that rethinking music theory in biological terms offers a new approach to centuries-long debates about the organization and impact of music.

Virtually all theories of how humans have become a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory focused on ontogenetic processes. Built on the essential ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first six years of life.

Proud, happy, grateful—gay youth describe their lives in terms that would have seemed surprising a generation ago. Yet many adults, including parents, are skeptical of this sea change—coming out is supposed to involve struggle. This is the kind of thinking, say the honest, humorous young men in Ritch Savin-Williams’s new book, that needs to change.

A growing number of young men today say they are “mostly straight” and yet feel a slight but enduring desire for men. Ritch Savin-Williams explores the stories of 40 mostly straight young men to help us understand the biological, psychological, and cultural forces that are loosening the sexual bind many boys and young men experience.

The British Empire used intelligence tests, laboratory studies, and psychoanalysis to measure and manage the minds of subjects in distant cultures. Challenging assumptions about the role of scientific knowledge in the exercise of power, Erik Linstrum shows that psychology did more to reveal the limits of imperial authority than to strengthen it.

By unlocking the evolutionary information contained in cells, biologists have been able to construct the Tree of Life and show that its three main stems are dominated by microbes. Plants and animals constitute a small upper branch in one stem. Soon we may know how life began over 3.5 billion years ago. John Ingraham tells this story of discovery.

Some historians have traced a line from Germany’s atrocities in its colonial wars to those committed by the Nazis during WWII. Susanne Kuss dismantles these claims, rejecting the notion that a distinctive military ethos or policy of genocide guided Germany’s conduct of operations in Africa and China, despite acts of unquestionable brutality.

What makes people fight for countries other than their own? Nir Arielli offers a wide-ranging history of foreign-war volunteers, from the French Revolution to Syria. Challenging notions of foreign fighters as a security problem, Arielli explores motivations, ideology, gender, international law, military significance, and the memory of war.

The Civil War is remembered as a war of brother against brother, with women standing innocently on the sidelines. But battlefield realities soon challenged this simplistic understanding of women’s place in war. Stephanie McCurry shows that women were indispensable to the unfolding of the Civil War, as they have been—and continue to be—in all wars.