Books published by Harvard University Press

After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn t like, guilty pleasures. "On Rereading" records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.

"To Free a Family" tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her son and daughter. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family s fate."

In 1896 a massive Ethiopian army routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy s conquest of Africa to an end. In defending its independence, Ethiopia cast doubt on the assumption that all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans, and opened a breach that would lead to the continent s painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule.

Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed through time, offering a panorama unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of the city's architecture and urban form. His narration illuminates how there can be "no one history of the city, but rather multiple, contested, and often invented histories."

Spreading democracy abroad or protecting business at home: this book offers a new look at the history of the contest between isolationism and internationalism that is as current as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as old as America itself, with profiles of the people, policies, and events that shaped the debate.

Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism, and proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward.

Strange, deformed, and piercingly beautiful, the child acrobat Mignon sprang onto the public stage in 1795. No child at all, but a figment of Goethe's fiction, Mignon appeared and reappeared in countless forms and guises over the next century. The meaning of this compelling creature is at the center of Carolyn Steedman's book, a brilliant account of how nineteenth-century notions of childhood, like those expressed in the figure of Mignon, gave birth to the modern idea of a self. During the nineteenth century, a change took place in the way people in Western societies understood themselves--the way they understood the self and how it came into being. Steedman tracks this development through changing attitudes about children and childhood as these appear in literature and law, medicine, science, and social history. Moving from the world of German fiction to that of child acrobats and "street arabs" in nineteenth-century Britain, from the theories of Freud to those of Foucault, she shows how the individual and personal history that a child embodied came to represent human "insideness." Particularly important for understanding this change is the part that Freudian psychoanalysis played, between 1900 and 1920, in summarizing and reformulating the Victorian idea that the core of an individual's psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood. Using the perspectives of social and cultural history, and the history of psychology and physiology, Strange Dislocations traces a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost vision has come to assume the form of a child.

Nandi Timmanäs Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the wish-granting p¿rij¿ta tree from the garden of Indra, king of the gods, to appease his wife Satyabhama. This is the first English translation of the poem, which prefigures the modern Telugu novel with its unprecedented narrative unity.

Oligarchy is a threat to the republic. Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show that, for most of US history, Americans saw the Constitution as responding to that threat by imposing on legislators a duty to break up oligarchy, block corporate political power, and ensure a broad distribution of wealth and political power among ordinary Americans.

Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick return to the primary sources on the origin, drafting and adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to better understand its original meaning. Arguing that it protected principles of Republican citizenship, fundamental rights and civic equality, they propose workable doctrines for implementing these principles in practice.

In his final work, Richard Rorty provides the definitive statement of his political thought. Rorty equates pragmatism with anti-authoritarianism, arguing that because there is no authority we can rely on to ascertain truth, we can only do so intersubjectively. It follows that we must learn to think and care about what others think and care about.

Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships social, cultural, political, economic, and legal were established during America s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America s first cities. "Eden on the Charles" explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a city upon a hill to the process of urbanization and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that for better or worse have defined urban America to this day. "

What equality means in three modern democracies, both to leaders of important groups and to challengers of the status quo, is the subject of this wide-ranging canvass of perceptions and policy. It is based on extensive questionnaire data gathered from leaders in various segments of society in each countrybusiness, labor unions, farm organizations, political parties, the media-as well as from groups that are seeking greater equalityfeminists, black leaders in the United States, leaders of the Burakumin in Japan. The authors describe the extent to which the same meanings of equality exist, both within and across nations, and locate the areas of consensus and conflict over equality. No other book has compared data of this sort for these purposes. The authors address several major substantive and theoretical issues: the role of values in relation to egalitarian outcomes; the comparison of values and perceptions about equality in economics (income equality) and politics (equality of influence); and the difference among the nations in the ways political institutions affect the incorporation of new demands for equality into the policymaking process. They pay particular attention to how policy is set on issues of gender equality. This book will be controversial, for some see no room in the understanding of political economy for the analysis of values. It will be consulted by a general audience interested in politics and culture as well as by social scientists. Elites and the Idea of Equality is an informative sequel to Equality in America by Sidney Verba and Gary R. Orren (Harvard University Press), which considers similar topics in a national context.

The Samaveda contains the earliest tradition of music from India. It presents largely Rigvedic textual material in a form arranged for singing in the solemn Srauta ritual. This edition is based on manuscripts collected from all over India and Europe. B. R. Sharma presents the accented text, its Padapatha, and commentaries.

Love Life follows Yora, an immigrant to the United States from Ukraine, as she becomes enmeshed with the seductive Sebastian. The second novel by the award-winning Ukrainian writer and poet Oksana Lutsyshyna, Love Life is a fascinating story of self-discovery amidst the complexities of adapting to a new life.

Love Life follows Yora, an immigrant to the United States from Ukraine, as she becomes enmeshed with the seductive Sebastian. The second novel by the award-winning Ukrainian writer and poet Oksana Lutsyshyna, Love Life is a fascinating story of self-discovery amidst the complexities of adapting to a new life.

Cornerstone of the Nation is the first historical account of the complex alliance of forces that catapulted South Koreäs modernization under Park Chung Hee. Kwon makes the case that arms development may be the most durable and yet least acknowledged factor behind the country¿s rise to economic prominence in the late twentieth century.

This volume covers the five-year period in which Garrison's three sons were born and he entered the arena of social reform with full force.

The events of World War I form a somber canvas for the exchanges in Volume 2 (July 1914 through December 1919). Uncertainty pervades the letters: Will Ferenczi be called up? Will food, fuel, and cigar shortages continue? Will Freud's enlisted sons and son-in-law come through the war intact? And will Freud's "problem-child," psychoanalysis, survive?

If existing models of the structure of the universe are correct, then 85 percent of the cosmos comprises a substance called dark matter. Yet no direct evidence of dark matter exists. Award-winning science journalist Govert Schilling details the quest to detect dark matter and how the search has helped us to understand the universe we inhabit.

Long before Greeks dominated the ancient Mediterranean, Phoenicians were the lords of the sea. Setting out from their Levantine cities, they introduced their alphabet, art, technology, and gods to places as far as off as Iberia. Carolina López-Ruiz highlights the enduring Phoenician imprint, displacing the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world.

Bobby Kennedy wasn¿t the most visible figure in the civil rights movement, but his impact was transformative. As attorney general, he protected the Freedom Riders and turned the Justice Department from an enemy of civil rights into an enforcer of antiracist policies. Patricia Sullivan gives Kennedy his rightful place as a force for racial justice.

Although Cicerös oratory is well attested¿of 106 known speeches, fifty-eight survive intact or in large part¿the sixteen speeches that survive only in quotations by later authors nevertheless fill gaps in our knowledge of Rome¿s greatest orator. This edition includes all speeches with attested fragments, together with testimonia.