Harvard University Press: 1090 books

Human-generated greenhouse gas emissions imperil a global resource: a biosphere capable of supporting life as we know it. What is the fair way to share this scarce resource across present and future generations and across regions of the world? This study offers a new perspective based on the guiding ethics of sustainability and egalitarianism.

Elizabeth Foster examines how French imperialists and the Africans they ruled imagined the religious future of sub-Saharan Africa in the years just before and after decolonization. The story encompasses the transition to independence, Catholic contributions to black intellectual currents, and efforts to create an authentically “African” church.

Offering fresh perspectives on perennial questions of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and religion, Rogers Brubaker analyzes three forces that shape the politics of diversity and multiculturalism today: inequality as a public concern, biology as an asserted basis of racial and ethnic difference, and religion as a key terrain of public contestation.

In 1939 Nazis identified Polish citizens of German origin and granted them legal status as ethnic Germans of the Reich. After the war Poland did just the opposite: searched out Germans of Polish origin and offered them Polish citizenship. John Kulczycki’s account underscores the processes of inclusion and exclusion that mold national communities.

Popular understanding holds that genetic changes create cancer. James DeGregori uses evolutionary principles to propose a new way of thinking about cancer’s occurrence. Cancer is as much a disease of evolution as it is of mutation, one in which mutated cells outcompete healthy cells in the ecosystem...

People are living longer, creating an unexpected boom in the elderly population. Longevity is increasing not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations as well. In response, many policy makers and scholars are preparing for a global crisis of aging. But for too long, Western experts have...

Debates over foreign aid can seem strangely innocent of history. Economists argue about effectiveness and measurement—how to make aid work. Meanwhile, critics in donor countries bemoan what they see as money wasted on corrupt tycoons or unworthy recipients. What most ignore is the essentially political...

Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It is also a new history of the French Revolution, with economics at its heart. In her telling, radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals—including “freedom of money”—and the harsh realities of daily life.

From 1815 to 1865, as city blocks encroached on farmland to accommodate Manhattan’s exploding population, prosperous New Yorkers developed new ideas about what an urban environment should contain—ideas that poorer immigrants resisted. As Catherine McNeur shows, taming Manhattan came at the cost of amplifying environmental and economic disparities.

Sara Fieldston shows how humanitarian child welfare agencies sponsored by Americans filtered political power through the prism of familial love after World War II. These well-meaning institutions shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations, and helped to expand American hegemony around the globe.

Many scientists and scientifically-minded philosophers are skeptical that free will exists. In clear, scientifically rigorous terms, Christian List explains that free will is like other real phenomena that emerge from physical laws but are autonomous from them—like an ecosystem or the economy—and are indispensable for explaining our world.

Germany’s 1941 seizure of Yugoslavia led to a bloody insurgency, and the Wehrmacht waged a brutal campaign in response—massive reprisal shootings, destruction of entire villages, and huge mobile operations against civilians. Terror in the Balkans explores the reasons behind Germany’s extreme security measures in southern and eastern Europe.

“Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves,” goes the popular lyric. The fact that the British built the world’s greatest empire on the basis of sea power has led many to assume that the Royal Navy’s place in British life was unchallenged. Yet, as Sarah Kinkel shows, the Navy was the subject...

Many people are familiar with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to open trade relations with Japan in the early 1850s. Less well known is that on the heels of the Perry squadron followed a Russian expedition secretly on the same mission. Serving as secretary to the naval commander was...