Books published by Harvard University Press

In the first comprehensive account of the Supreme Court¿s race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and a renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice. Discussing nearly 200 cases in historical context, the authors show the Court can still help fulfill the nation¿s promise of equality for all.

In his description of Ulysses in Inferno, Dante subjected the legendary Greek hero to a thoroughgoing revision. Dante portrays a profoundly restless character who finds not fulfillment but death. Ulysses and the Limits of Dante¿s Humanism / Ulisse o dei limiti dell¿umanesimo dantesco offers a bilingual English and Italian examination.

The Making of Chinäs Post Office traces the origins and early development¿and the political maneuverings and economic imperatives¿of the institution. Using Chinese archives, Tsai illustrates the extent to which local agency shaped the design and development of the first nationwide modernization project to directly impact people¿s daily lives.

The Collapse of Heaven investigates a long-neglected century in Chinese literature through the lens of the Taiping War (1851¿1864). Huan Jin examines manifold literary and cultural transformations through pamphlets, diaries, poetry, fiction, and drama. The book offers an important comparative perspective on the global nineteenth century.

Transpatial Modernity offers the first in-depth account of the relationship among Chinese, Japanese, and Russian literature in the modern era. Xiaolu Ma discusses leading cultural figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Futabatei Shimei, and Lu Xun and demonstrates the central role of relay transculturation as the key to understanding East Asian modernity.

Drawing on both contemporaneous historical sources and modern literary criticism, Navigating Narratives offers unique insights into Heian Japan through one of its most enigmatic and consequential texts, Tosa nikki (The Tosa Diary)¿the world¿s first short novelistic work of fiction, which purports to record the voyage of an anonymous woman.

The interdisciplinary essays in Global Gold¿by scholars of European, American, African, and Asian history and art history¿explore gold¿s monetary, economic, and aesthetic roles within the crucible of a unique historical period of transition, conquest, and the exploitation of natural and human resources.

Organizations now measure and rank nearly every aspect of our lives, using data to make predictions about our purchasing power, tastes, and character. The Ordinal Society shows how these predictions structure life chances, producing a hollow morality that launders familiar forms of social advantage into an illusion of merit.

Across the twentieth century, Asians imagined universalist ideals centered on the idea of Asia itself, rivaling European colonial thought, liberalism, and race-based nationalisms. Sugata Bose explores the history of Asian universalisms and reflects on their potential amid ongoing nationalist rivalries tied to religious majoritarianism and violence.

The Center for the Study of World Religions Peripheries Poetry Series publishes contemporary poetry, alongside fiction, visual art, sound works, and archival material. Peripheries 6 includes a folio, ¿Anti-Letters,¿ as well as works by Aracelis Girmay, Brionne Janae, Ilya Kaminsky, Tracy K. Smith, and an Ocean Vuong interview, among others.

Florence¿s iconic foundling home of the Innocenti is often taken as a symbol of Renaissance creativity, innovation, and humanity. The essays in Lost and Found explore new dimensions and contexts for foundling care at the Innocenti and use archival documents and digital tools to locate it architecturally, geographically, and socially.

Ancient Greek Heroes, Athletes, Poetry centers on masterpieces of ancient Greek literature, from the Iliad and Odyssey to tragedies from the Classical Age of Athens and beyond. With a focus on the Olympics, Gregory Nagy investigates how the heroes of ancient Greek poetry related to athletes, female as well as male.

Samantha Kelly tells the story of Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims in sixteenth-century Rome. The only African community in premodern Europe to leave extensive documentation in their own language, they negotiated religious pluralism amid rising Catholic conformity and collaborated with Latin Christians on scholarly projects of enduring interest.

Chinäs modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Pivot of China tells this story through the city of Zhengzhou, a dramatic urbanization success and ¿National Central City¿ that, due to spatial politics, concentrates resources at the expense of its peripheries.

National security once was not limited to physical defense. FDR equated national security with safety from foreign attack and economic want; conservatives, fearful of costs and federal expansion, stripped out domestic policy. The Contest over National Security explains why the US developed separate, imbalanced national security and welfare states.

The Iberian Apollonius of Tyre includes the poem The Book of Apollonius, a creative and Christianized adaptation, and the prose Life and History of King Apollonius, a highly literal translation of the Latin Gesta Romanorum. This volume presents new editions and English translations of these two medieval Spanish versions of the ancient legend.

Songs about Women by Romanos the Melodist contains eighteen works related to the liturgical calendar that feature important female characters, many portrayed as models for Christian life. This edition presents a new translation of the Byzantine Greek texts into English.

Among the late nineteenth-century profusion of evolutionary ideas, Wilhelm Roux¿s theory of a struggle for existence within organisms¿between tissues, cells, and even subcellular components¿is one of the most important. Evolutionary biologist David Haig and Richard Bondi present the first-ever English translation of Roux¿s pioneering work.

A groundbreaking history of philosophy and punishment, The Prison before the Panopticon traces the influence of ancient political philosophy on the modern institution of the prison, showing how prevailing theories of carceral rehabilitation and common justifications for the denial of liberty developed in classical and early modern thought.

Anthony Gregory traces the origins of Americäs modern law-and-order politics to a surprising source: the New Deal, the crucible of modern liberalism. FDR¿s tough-on-crime agenda played a crucial role in the New Dealers¿ reform agenda, which greatly expanded the limits of federal power and fundamentally altered the future of the state.

Bargains are a fact of political life. But if bargaining inevitably involves asymmetric power, can it ever be just? Drawing on an analogy to the private law of contracts and on case studies across arenas of civic life, Democratic Deals shows that, subject to proper limits, bargaining can secure political equality and protect fundamental interests.

Philosophers have spent millennia accumulating knowledge about knowledge. But negative epistemological phenomena, such as ignorance, falsity, and delusion, are persistently overlooked. Markus Gabriel argues that being wrong is part and parcel of subjectivity itself, adding a novel perspective on epistemic failures to the work of New Realism.

Yakov Feygin argues that Soviet decline owes much to internal tensions over economic reform. Focused on socioeconomic competition with the West, Khrushchev and his successors sought to build a consumer society but had only Stalinist institutions of mass mobilization to work with, resulting in unresolvable contradiction and eventual sclerosis.

From Booker T. Washington to a neighbor who speaks up at a city council meeting, many of the people who represent us were never elected. Wendy Salkin provides the first systematic analysis of the ubiquitous phenomenon of informal political representation, a practice of immense political value that raises serious ethical concerns.

In Experimentalist Constitutions, the first book that systematically compares subnational experimentalism in different countries, Wang argues that ¿laboratories of democracy¿ are not exclusive to the American system; instead, similar concepts apply in China and India, with different center¿local structures and levels of political competition.

What was the representation of the Mongol invasions in Japan, and what role did it play as a repertoire of cultural identity before the rise of hyper-nationalism? The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan points to the continuities and ruptures that marked the emergence of a national culture after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Travelers have always experimented with disguise while observing the disguises of others. Each of the chapters in Mobility and Masks illustrates strategies of concealment in travel, from Jesuits in Asia to women traveling incognito to a Chinese opera star in Russia to the racial implications of masking in the West Indies.

Julia Rombough explores the regulation of sound in women¿s residential institutions in early modern Florence. Silence was tied to ideals of feminine purity and spiritual discipline, yet enclosed women still laughed, shouted, sang, and conversed. A Veil of Silence offers a revealing history of the political and spiritual meanings of the senses.